see also:

• photography and camping main index page

• this may be because your software or operating system cannot display that format (eg. newer RAW files, HEIF files)
  • check your software for an update
• if the software does display some but not all, then it may be because the files have been corrupted - see below

• if deleted in Windows, go to Recycle Bin on your Desktop and if it is there just Right-click and restore it
• if it is not in the Recycle Bin or it was deleted in the camera, do NOT take further photos or save new files to that drive or memory card until you have tried to recover it
  • deleting a file “permanently” just removes the index for that file from the system's File Allocation Table (FAT), tha actual file is still physically there (as long as it doesn't get over-written by a new file save) but not easily accessible
• BEFORE you do anything, perhaps read my blog on how Windows CHKDSK can cause further problems, and how I solved them - see [SOLVD] Windows 10 Update corrupts 4Gb file then CHKDSK deletes it!

• if it was a Sandisk SD card then your purchase usually includes option to download the SanDisk Recovery Software
• I ended up purchasing EaseUS Data Recovery Wizard Pro version and this worked well for me - see my blog above

• check the video player is able to play the video codec of your video files
  • download the free VideoLan VLC media player - it generally runs most video codecs and is excellent

• this is a freeware video player but also has some hidden functions
• in my experience the repair methods did not work for me but you can Google them

• go to their website: https://main.grauonline.de/?page_id=5 and download the file
• unzip the download
• run gs.exe
• press Choose Movie to select your corrupted file
• press Choose reference movie to select a file that is NOT corrupted from the same camera
• press Scan
• you should hopefully have a recovered NEW video file in the subfolder called repaired
  • if there was no audio, you may need to go into options and select ‘Enable AAC detection‘ (for AAC audio) or ‘Enable PCM audio‘ (for PCM audio) and try again
  • however it seems there are no guarantees you will get a nice playback or have an audio track
• if you are using the demo version this recovered video file will only be the 1st half of the file
  • either pay for the app, or,
  • double the size of the corrupted file before running it:
    • open command line editor (eg. type cmd in the Windows Search bar)
    • navigate to the folder of your corrupted file (eg. use DOS commands cd etc)
    • type copy /b bad.mp4 + bad.mp4 bad_double.mp4
    • where bad.mp4 is the name of your corrupted file and double.mp4 will be the name of your double sized file