Link Safe

Picture the scene: you’ve just come back from holiday with a memory card full of photos, but when you connect your camera to your PC, it’s unable to read the card to download the images. Before you panic, try the following to find and fix the errors on the memory card: on the Start menu, type cmd and press Enter to open Command Prompt or, in Windows 8+, point to the lowerright corner of the screen, click Search and type Command Prompt. When the Command Prompt opens, type CHKDSK/F followed by the letter of the drive (in this case, the SD card), for example E:, and press Enter. Windows will then verify the files and folders stored on the card, and correct any problems it finds. With a bit of luck, you’ll be able to access your images.

Another way to retrieve pictures from a corrupt card, as well as a damaged hard drive or USB stick, is to use PhotoRec (bit.ly/PhotoRec). This is a portable tool that doesn’t need to be installed, so it won’t overwrite your images, although you do need to download the program (which comes packaged with another tool called TestDisk) and extract the photorec_win file. When you run this, it will open a command line window that lists all the devices connected to your PC. Select the one with the photos stored on it, press Enter and follow the instructions. You’ll find a step-by-step guide to using PhotoRec at bit.ly/PhotoGuide. 

If a specific photo has been corrupted, you could try the aforementioned OfficeRecovery, which offers an online tool for repairing images in JPEG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG or RAW format. Again, you’ll either need to pay or wait to download the recovered image, or it will be obscured by a message like the one pictured, left.