Set 2 fully recovered
Hi,
I want to thank everyone for their help. I was able to fully recover the missing set that had been lost. The directory showed the fail as zero length.
First and most important, if you have trouble with a flash card back the data up. Do not write to the card. I used two programs, WinImage and the SanDisk program linked to in this thread. Both made identical backups of the flash card to my hard drive in the .img format.
The solution is extremely easy. In fact I tried it before I posted this thread but because of size limitations it didn't work for me. After I ran around the block trying other stuff I went back to what I had tried before and made it work.
Audacity, and presumably many other DAWs, can read RAW data. That is pull the .wav file data right off your .img backup whether the file system is pointing to it or not. This will also work with deleted files if they have not been overwritten. It works best with contiguous data although if you can find all the pieces of your missing music you could paste them together in your DAW.
CS101 - All computer resources are finite. A 4 gig card creates a 4 gig image and it was too big for Audacity. That's why loading RAW data didn't work the first time I tried it.
So I used FreeFileSplitter and I split the .img file up into 512 MB chunks. Then I renamed these 1.wav, 2.wav, etc. (I'm not sure if this is absolutely necessary.)
I loaded these files into Audacity using the load RAW function. There is a screen where you can select bitrate, etc. I didn't have to change anything but if you are recording at another bitrate I assume you can still read it by tweaking this screen.
I found Set 2 on 3.wav and 4.wav. I saved both sections and jammed them together in my DAW. Then I wrote out the .wav file and wrote it to CD.
Easy. Once you know how.
I also checked 5.wav and 6.wav and found previous audio that had been deleted. So although there are utilities for recovering accidentally deleted files, at least as far as .wav data goes they aren't strictly necessary.
The reason I use a 4 gig flash card is so I can always back up the data from a card onto a DVD. Besides the 6 hours plus of stereo data at CD quality is more than adequate. So my procedure is to backup the card to my hard drive and then to a DVD and then delete all the files from the flash card only after I've checked my DVD backup.
This way I always start with an empty card and my files remain contiguous. I didn't do this because I thought I might need to recover lost data but It didn't hurt.
To quote the bard, "All's well that end's well."
Thanks,
Hairy Larry