First, I would advise you in the future to never have your computer
write back to the CF card. Supposedly it's logically a standard FAT or
FAT-32 disk but I've heard too many stories of incompatibilty with the
camera. Perhaps it's nothing but the directory structure that the
camera expects but I prefer to stay away.
All that said, it would appear that you've located a bug in Olympus
Viewer. Hard to say what it actually did except that it wrote some
trash to the CF card somewhere. I think it's highly unlikey that it
actually erased all the images, however.
I think all or most of them are still there. I think I'd look for a
smarter utility. Lexar has a free utility which comes installed on
their cards. What was on my cards was version 1.5 which had to be
upgraded to version 2.0 from here:
<http://www.lexar.com/drivers/index.html#software?
It claims to work on all media types from all manufacturers.
Fortunately, I've never had to use it so I can't tell you how well it works.
Don't know what type of media card you have but it might pay to look around.
Chuck Norcutt
Joel Wilcox wrote:
> Well, I finally did it.
>
> Instead of transferring files from my CF card to the computer to sort
> through the images, I opened Olympus Viewer and did some browsing. I'd
> been shooting RAW +SQ with the E-1, so I was checking out the jpgs
> quickly. They are easy to delete in browse mode, but you really need to go
> to view mode to see the images large enough to know what you got in the
> shot. View mode also allows you to delete, but since it always has one
> image open, it won't let you delete that image (since it's open). If you
> highlight two images, it will delete one, but not the other, since one of
> them will be open. It gives you an error message to that effect, but the
> consequences of trying to do this appear to be more dire than the message
> suggests.
>
> Wanting to delete and being too lazy to go back to browser mode combined to
> cause me, somehow, to lose every image on the card. I tried to delete an
> image in view mode in the manner just described, couldn't, then tried to
> switch to browse mode to delete the image and, pow, I managed to nuke the
> entire "100Olymp" folder from the CF card. Never saw anything like it and
> have never had anything like it happen to me before.
>
> I downloaded a freeware file recovery program (PC Inspector Smart
> Recovery). It ran through a standard recovery algorithm and then a deep
> recovery one but could recover no files. The recovery program seems to
> look for files -- in this case, specifically for .ORF files -- whereas I
> lost the entire folder the files were in. Don't know if the program could
> restore the files without also restoring the folder first. Is there a way
> to do that?
>
> I'm open to suggestions. The loss is not horrendous, but there were a
> couple shots I wouldn't mind having back.
>
> Joel W.
>
>
>
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