PhotoRec - Recover your lost files!!! (Life with my Nikon D40)

So, I had some family in this weekend and had taken hundreds of pictures with my new Nikon D40. Your probably reading this thinking "So? Everybody takes pictures of their family..." Well you would be correct, except that these photos are of my brother n' laws first trip to Chicago. Needless to say they are quite important, and the 'Wifey' was a little upset when I mentioned the following:

Me: 'So, honey... you know those 250+ photos I shot yesterday of everyone in one of the coolest cities in America?'
Wifey: 'Yes'
Me: 'Well I just transferred them to the laptop (Dell D630, Ubuntu 8.04 64bit)'
Wifey: 'Yeees'
Me: 'They have mysteriously dissapeared...'
Wifey: 'YES!'
Me: 'I'm not sure what happened to them'
Wifey: 'YES!!!!'
Me: 'Oh, wait, let me see if I can find a way to recover the images from the lost partitions'
Wifey: 'Wait, you lost ALL those photos?'
Me: 'yeeeeeeeees...'

Anyway, I was able to find this thread in the Ubuntu Forums - http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=172296

Thankfully, I'm not the only person who forgets to switch off the camera before putting it in the nice, new, padded camera bag and then have the nice, new, supersweet camera figure out how to erase the SD card. So, I installed TestDisk from the repositories and after reading the Ubuntu Forum Thread I discovered that it comes with a program called PhotoRec.

ATTENTION... THIS PROGRAM WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE AND YOUR MARRIAGE... (not really, but it will recover your photos if they are deleted)



Everything ran in the command line with prompts so don't be afraid of the dreaded 'command line'. I was able to recover ALL 250+ photos that I took and my Wife still loves me! Not a bad day if I say so myself...