Saved by RescuePro – Hokuto:
Although I'd never had either disc out of its envelope in the years since buying them, my drive refused to read the first disc at all (the surface of both discs looked a bit distressed or moldy). The second disc was readable, however, so I loaded the program and started looking at my CF cards. On the third try, I found the right card, and lo and behold, even after several deletes and reuses, it had 600+ recoverable photographs on it, among which were the 179 missing from the class that day–and based on the time stamps it's clear that they start immediately after the final corrupted photograph on my hdd.
This is nothing short of amazing to me; I'm lucky that I didn't reformat the cards after use, of course, but doubly lucky that the way I used my combination of cards allowed so many photographs to be still recoverable from that specific card.
In conclusion, never give up, if you think you've lost photographs, try RescuePro anyway.
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