(Corrupt?) CFast Card / repair

Last night, I filmed something for a client on the URSA mini 4.6k and the clips played fine when vieiwing them on the camera. When I put the CFast card (Lexar 3400x 128 GB) in my card reader on my nMacPro, the card wouldn't mount. When I go to disk utility, it shows Card A001 but it won't mount it. When I try to do a repair in Disk Utility, Disk Utility freezes/crashes. Anyone have any ideas how I can try to retrieve the data from this card?

Thanks so much!
Kyle

Last night, I filmed something for a client on the URSA mini 4.6k and the clips played fine when vieiwing them on the camera. When I put the CFast card (Lexar 3400x 128 GB) in my card reader on my nMacPro, the card wouldn't mount. When I go to disk utility, it shows Card A001 but it won't mount it. When I try to do a repair in Disk Utility, Disk Utility freezes/crashes. Anyone have any ideas how I can try to retrieve the data from this card?

Thanks so much!
Kyle

I have had this happen a few times too but only when trying to look on my laptop via USB3.0 so I presumed it was a cable problem. My laptop has come up with "the card needs initialising" before and it scared the crap out of me as I had a whole days worth of footage on there, luckily after plugging and unplugging the card reader it eventually mounted.

I have never had a problem on my iMac connected via thunderbolt though, not sure if its just a coincidence or not, so try plugging and unplugging a few times and see if it will eventually mount.

Out of interest I use a Lexar Workflow CR2 Reader & Transcend CFast 2.0 CFX650 card.

You can try booting into safe mode by holding Shift when the computer restarts. It should show up and let you browse the drive.

If you shot in raw, I wrote a small utility that will copy all of the good frames from an image sequence and fill in any dropped frames with the nearest good frame: https://github.com/stephenplusplus/dropped-frames -- if that would help, let me know if you need any help getting it running.

You should prevent such situations in a first place.

1. Be sure that your card reader is adequately cooled. I have lost data many times due to overheat of SATA/USB bridge. No problems after I glued a big fat heat sink there.

2. Always mount the reader read only (or at least "noatime"). See your OS documentation. Discard the OS that does not allow it.

3. If you experience some problem with the card that contains precious data, never try any data recovery programs that modify the card itself. Make a copy of the card to the image file and then mount the said file. See your OS documentation.

4. I think that CFast to SATA adapter is better than CFast to USB one. At least it's passive and there is nothing that could fail. Some notebooks (Lenovo) allow replacement of CD-ROM with HDD caddy where the CFast/SATA adapter could be installed.

Try reading the card on Windows and use the auto fixing function that pops up. Check that topic:

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=53174

Thank you all for your help! I was able to recover all of the shots using GetData's "Recovery My Files" program...

http://www.getdata.com

It's $80, but well-worth saving a card of footage!

Thanks, again!
Kyle

Same topic https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=53174