I went out for New Year Eve, had a wonderful time and took many pictures. Upon reviewing my pictures, I noticed that about half of them were a blank icon with a lightning bolt in the top center. I was very upset about this, but said to myself "well, at least I have half of my pictures".
Then I took the microSD card out of my phone and put it into a card reader and plugged it into my Windows 7 computer.
Upon doing so, I got the message ".......Scan and Fix (recommended) with the option to continue or cancel. I chose continue and all my pictures were deleted from New Years Eve. Ironically, all of my other pictures remained intact and available.
I downloaded and tried more than 15 different data recovery software programs and it only found files that I had already copied; no files from New Years Eve.
I read somewhere that there might be a place where the pictures may be in a hidden file system area under a different file extension and that all I had to do was change the file extension and I would get my pictures back.
Well, after a thorough search, I came up with no files.
I've been reading about "dirty bits" and ran "CHKDSK" from an administrator command prompt typed "fsutil dirty query e:" and it does say that the volume is dirty. I don't want to clear the dirty bit by formatting my microsd card because I will hurt my chances even more of recovering my files. I spoke with Microsoft for over an hour today and no one seems to know about "dirty bits". I believe I read that clearing the dirty bit MAY allow me to see and recover my pictures, but I won't know until I can make that happen.
The file system on the Sandisc microsd 64GB SDHC card is ExFAT and the operating system I tried this on is windows 7 64bit Ultimate . I also tried to recover these files from my Samsung Galaxy S4 and had no luck either.
The worse thing is that I DO use Google backup for my pictures, but I had just factory reset my phone THAT day and hadn't yet had a chance to set it up
If anyone knows of a way to restore my beautiful, priceless pictures from New Years Eve, I would be extremely grateful.
Thanks so much to anyone that can help a very sad person who's new year didn't start off the right way.