I had some trouble with my camera today. A couple of my photo got corrupted and when I deleted them and took more photos, some would get corrupted. Luckily, I take multiple shot of each subject, so I didn’t loss too much.

I figured that there was some bad areas on the memory card, so I downloaded all the photos that could be downloaded and reformatted the card.

I took several hundred test photos and encountered more corruption, which confirmed that there are bad areas on the memory card.

I then remember a trick that I use to do back in the Atari days when I would get bad sectors on floppy disks.

1. I downloaded (and deleted) all the photos that could be downloaded (using a USB cable plugged into the camera). This left all the corrupted files on the memory card.

2. I then took the memory card out and used a memory card reader to mount the card on my computer as a drive.

3. I replaced all the “.JPG” in the filename of the corrupted files (that was left on the memory card) to “.XXX”. So “IMG_4052.JPG” would be “IMG_4052.XXX”.

This keeps the corrupted areas occupied by a file that the camera no longer recognizes. Now the camera can’t write to the corrupted areas because there is a file there… and the camera ignores the file because it’s not a JPG.

4. I took a few hundred more test photos, and I no longer got memory card errors.

Just to be safe, I downloaded (and deleted) all the JPG photos, and took more test shots. No more errors.

Whoo!