[Leica] Memory card recovery (WAS Panasonic LX1 connection...Help!)

[shino at panix.com (Rei Shinozuka)]

On Jun21 20:19, Brian Reid wrote:
> That error message says, basically, that it's been too long since you 
> reformatted your SD card; the problem is that if you format the SD card, 
> you will lose the pictures that are on it.
> 
> Once you've reformatted it, you shouldn't have any problems.

I am intrigued by the "too long since you reformatted your SD card" 
admonition.  The symptoms were reported as:

> A box with a red stop sign and exclamation point says, "You have
> inserted a disk containing no volumes that Mac OS X can read. To
> Continue with the disk inserted, click ignore." And I can click
> "Ignore," "Initialize," or "Eject."

Is the problem a bug in the camera's storage software which somehow
corrupted the filesystem structures?  My wife's Kodak may have
developed a penchant for that trashing cards (including a new 1 GB
within a week of using it).  When powered on, the camera asks to 
reformat the card, and computers don't recognize the card's 
filesystem.  I've had pretty good luck with this GPL'ed recovery 
package getting the "lost" JPGs back:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/photorec.html

It works (like other recovery programs) by ignoring the corrupted
directory information and scanning through the raw data sectors.
After sucking off the images, the card can be reformatted, which
brings it back to life.

The experience has made me leery of deleting images in the camera,
for fear of having the camera mess with and possibly corrupt the 
directory structure.  In addition, it would appear logical that a 
fragmented filesystem would be more difficult to recover.  I've
also made note to self to always completely reformat the card after
deleting the images.

-rei

-- 
Rei Shinozuka shino@panix.com
Ridgewood, New Jersey