Linux to the Rescue

 Frequently, when things are not working quite right in Windows, on Linux things just work. Especially if there is corruption of a file or file system.

Recently Linux came to my rescue when Windows could not see the recent pictures on my wife's Nikon DSLR camera of my daughter's dance recital.

Windows would try to import the pictures when it is plugged in, but for an unknown reason would only open the folder of what it imported, and that folder was empty.  Cue panicked heart palpitations!

Cooler heads (mine) went to see if I could navigate to the camera's contents through the file manager. Luckily I could, and so verified the pictures were still there! Whew!  Time to copy the pictures off and manually put them where we want.  That's when things didn't work again.

I could take the entire folder, or individual pictures, and copy them (via right-click).  However, when I try to paste them anywhere in the computer, there is an error message about the device being "busy".  It was then I noticed that every few seconds the activity light on the camera would flash.

Verified that all of the files were being displayed and all activity with the camera's drive should be completed. Still the light blinked, like a slow heartbeat.

This is when I moved it over to my Linux laptop.  Plugging the SD card in, the file manager popped-up and the contents of the SD card showed right up.  I could navigate through the card or, more importantly, copy the entire directory onto my laptop's hard drive!

I didn't see any messages regarding the files or folder or drive being corrupted or questionable until I tried to eject the card.  To be safe I closed it all out, shut down the laptop and removed the SD card before booting up again.

Once it booted up again I made a copy on a USB Thumbdrive so the pictures can be copied over to my wife's desktop.  That all works an she could copy them wherever she wants them.

Meanwhile I used Shotwell on my Linux laptop to import all of the pictures and to sort / store them in my pre-defined structure (yyyy/yyyy-mm-dd/).

This isn't the first time Linux has come to my rescue and could either work when Windows doesn't, or provide me with more information on what is going on and how to fix it.