found these OLD notes on a process I successfully used ONCE.

hope it helps,
manny

Pretty much most of the answers have been for users of Win32 operating systems, so I'll post a little note here about howto recover corrupted JPEG files from compact flash here for Linux or UNIX users.

Step 1: load the CF card as a read-only filesystem. A number of options exist. Linux, for example, supports many cameras through the usb-storage.o driver. You simpy connect the USB cable from the workstation to the camera, turn on the camera, and then try to mount the CF card as a filesystem. The usb-storage.o driver will usually use SCSI emulation and present the drive as /dev/sda1 or some number. On Linux 2.4.x kernels, look in the /var/log/messages file for a line containing "kernel: sda: sda1" or something similar.

For laptop users, one may still connect using USB on newer laptops, but more commonly, one uses a PCMCIA adaptor card for CF. These are relatively cheap - around $14 in 2002 when I bought them. The CF card slides into the PCMCIA adapter and the whole unit pops into the laptop. If audio notifications on the PCMCIA driver were enabled, one should hear two positive "beeps". This means that the CF card should now be recognized as drive /dev/hde1 (again, see messages file for actual device name)

Step 2: Mount the filesystem read-only at first and just do a directory listing to see if Linux recognizes files that the camera or plain win32 won't see. This can be done by creating the mount point and mounting the filesystem:

# mkdir /mnt/cflash # mount -t vfab -o ro /dev/hde1 /mnt/cflash

Step 3: If the images are present and can be copied to disk, do so at this point and finish. Otherwise, we'll need to do a full filesystem dump of contents into a file and then run a jpeg extraction utility to parse and extract jpeg files for the flash image on disk. To do the dump on UNIX, use the 'dd' command.

# dd flash.img

This should produce a dump of the entire contents of the flash ram to disk file.

Step 4: The final step requires one to download a DOS utility called "jpegdump" found at http://www.goto.onlinehome.de/dsc/jpegdump.htm and then running it under the Linux Wine (Windoze Emulator) utility.

# wine -- jpegdump -recover flash.img

In the currect working directory, the jpegdump extracts out a large number of ordered JPG files. I hope this helps. And Linux rocks. The 'dd' utility combined with Wine running jpegdump in emulation works beautifully. I was able to recover all 32 MB of stored JPEGs

recovered with following:

wine -- jpegdump.exe -recover c:\dianesPICSdd.img


this created recoverred jpg files under the wine windows directory...