It took me a while to post the previous Catalina journal entry (even though I wrote it Monday morning) because my new camera lost most of the files that I took with it, and I wanted the chance to recover them, which finally happened.

But not without about six hours' work and $70 buying some file-recovery software. (Yeah, kind of expensive, but these have quite a bit of sentimental value already, and hey, now I have some photo recovery software for future use that I hope I never have to use.)

I believe that the trouble resulted from popping the Microdrive out of the old Casio into the new FinePix camera without reformatting it. Perhaps not, but I'm going to reformat it now and use it a lot and see whether the problem crops up again before I make a final determination.

Initial indications that the image files had survived came when most of the six Windows file-recovery programs showed me at least some of the missing images on the Microdrive. The problem was, however, that all of them would hang at some point during the recovery process, even the one program that I actually bought because the demo version seemed to be doing a good job.

That was last night. Today I mentioned to Kenny that one of the folders on the Microdrive was named (corruptly) with a graphic character, which is not acceptable to Windows, and I thought that might be the cause of the problem. He suggested the obvious: try recovering from the Macintosh. A truly good idea, which led to final recovery almost straightaway. Thanks Kenny!

Macintosh: 1, Windows: 0

Programs that did not work on Windows:

VirtualLab Client
Digitial Photo Recovery
PhotoRescue PC
eIMAGE Recovery
Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS
mediaRECOVER

Program that did not work on Macintosh:

mediaRECOVER

Program that did work on Macintosh:

PHOTORECOVERY

Right. Time to go reformat the drive and enjoy my new camera!