How to Recover Corrupt jpeg and mov Files from a Digital Camera’s SDD Card on Fedora/CentOS/RHEL

Background

Have you ever had a digital camera SDD card get corrupt and become unreadable? Through the use of the handy tool photorec, all the files on the card can be recovered.

Installation

First you need to install photorec. It’s included in a package called testdisk. This package was available in the CentOS/RHEL epel repos as well as the Fedora 14 repo.

% sudo yum install testdisk
Loaded plugins: langpacks, presto, refresh-packagekit
Adding en_US to language list
Setting up Install Process
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package testdisk.x86_64 0:6.11-6.fc12 set to be installed
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
 
Dependencies Resolved
 
====================================================================================================================================
 Package                        Arch                         Version                             Repository                    Size
====================================================================================================================================
Installing:
 testdisk                       x86_64                       6.11-6.fc12                         fedora                       257 k
 
Transaction Summary
====================================================================================================================================
Install       1 Package(s)
 
Total download size: 257 k
Installed size: 859 k
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
Setting up and reading Presto delta metadata
Processing delta metadata
Package(s) data still to download: 257 k
testdisk-6.11-6.fc12.x86_64.rpm                                                                              | 257 kB     00:02     
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing     : testdisk-6.11-6.fc12.x86_64                                                                                  1/1 
 
Installed:
  testdisk.x86_64 0:6.11-6.fc12                                                                                                     
 
Complete!