Flooded CF

Hi there,

does any of you have any experiance with a CF card that`s been submerged in sea water (in the camera ) for more then just a minute or two?

Any idea how to treat it and how to go about retrieving the pictures?

My experience with SmartMedia cards is that you can rinse them off, dry them off, stick them in something that works (since your camera probably doesn't at this point), and keep right on going.

CF Cards are a bit different I think in that they have "hole-pin" connections, with the holes on the CF card and the pins in the device. If the holes get plugged up w/ salt creep and corrosion products, you are probably out of luck.

Other than that, I have heard of CF cards going through the washing machine and still working, but that's fresh water.

FWIW, I did flood my S2 with Microdrive. I would say the MD got "splashed" w/ water, but not soaked. After drying off/blowing off w/ air, it still works.

Cheers

James

SharpDiver, what did you wash your SmartMedia with? Tap water or did you use distilled water? Glad for you it worked.

I know for sure CF is designed diffrently. I got the card dry and tried it with no luck so far- nothing came on.

Right about the camera-she`s dead.

I may have been subconciously trying to rub salt in a wound. I wasn't sure that a CF card would survive, but I was guessing, no. SmartMedia has taken a bad rap for being less than robust, but my experience has been that they are darn near bulletproof. It's too bad that the size expansion stalled out because the format lost support.

I twice flooded a SmartMedia card, and both times ran it under tap water for a few minutes, toweled it off and read the card in a reader.

When I flooded a bulkhead I cleaned it with my ear drops and compressed air out of a tank. The ear drops are basically just alcohol anyway.

The last liveaboard was so filthy I couldn't keep anything clean. I had to store my ports opening-down to keep them from becoming ashtrays. My D100 quickly developed CCD klingons so I improvised a cleaning solution. I set the shutter speed to bulb and pressed the shutter. Sure enough the mirror locked up and exposed the CCD. I cleaned as much as I could with a Q-tip and then blew the camera out using a tank. Perfect! Got some nice, white pictures, too.

Here's the poop on solid-state things like a CF card.

IF you catch the flood before the card submerges TURN OFF THE CAMERA! It is critically important that POWER be turned off - otherwise, with salt water being conductive, you're screwed as you will end up applying voltage where it shouldn't go.

Ok, so you get the camera out of the water and its flooded. First things first - DO NOT REMOVE IT FROM WATER UNTIL YOU ARE PREPARED TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. If you take it out and it DRIES, you're screwed. As soon as air gets to the electronics you start corrosion and it takes very little of that to destroy the card.

So, let's assume you have written off the camera but there's a good storage card in there. OK. Remove the camera and IMMEDIATELY replace the CF card UNDER WATER (fresh if you have it!) KEEP IT THERE until you're ready to proceed. Even if you keep it there a WEEK you're better off than removing it and letting it dry!

To proceed you need:

1. DEIONIZED water. A few gallons of it, in jugs.

2. RUBBING ALCOHOL. Not the 70% stuff either - 90% will work, 100% is even better, but damn hard to get. Settle for the 90% (which you CAN get in most drug stores, but you may have to ask for it.) There are better solutions than isopropyl alcohol for this, but you won't be able to find them easily - this is your best shot with something you can easily buy.

What you're going to do is two-fold:

1. REMOVE THE SALT. You do this with successive soaks/rinses in the deionized water. You're counting on diffusion to work here. It will take SEVERAL soak/rinse cycles to get the salt water out. At no time do you allow the card to dry out! Expect to spend several hours doing successive soak/agitate/rinse cycles with NEW deionized water for each. When you get to where you cannot taste ANY contaminatino in the rinse water, you're making progress. Do several more cycles beyond that point just to make damn sure you got it all out. ONE salt crystal will screw you a week or a month later, so do a good job!

2. Once the salt is out, you want to DRY the card. You need to do this WITHOUT any ions that are left dropping out on the card's electronisc. That's what the alcohol is for. A few soak/rinse cycles of the isopropyl alcohol will effectively remove the water from the card, as they are miscable - the alcohol will then evaporate and leave a nice, dry card. You can't taste the alcohol for a test, of course, so you have to guess here when you've effectively displaced all the water.

IF the card did not get submerged with power applied, and you follow this procedure, it should be ok.

I've recovered several electronic items that were dunked in salt water this way with reasonable success. If it goes in the drink with the power on, however, the odds are nearly zero. as things tend to short out in salt water when they're powered up and submerged.

Yep,

I agree with Genesis

Virtualy any PCBs are run through a wash test and that is spray the assembled PCb with parts on with water (I am not sure what type - certainly fresh) at a nice preassure and then they are dried out. This is to see if all the solder caught and therea re no loose components.

Sea water, as somebody said, if you got power through and it shorted the flash chip inside, you are screwed.

If there is something to be saved and if you REALLY can't do anything else, you can open the CF card and clean it like this. As a last sollution, you could probably desolder the flash chip and rig a new PCB to try to retrive the photos.

Good luck

(I flooded my camera too but with fresh water and then the CF worked without any problem).

Vlad

All I can say is I wish I had Genesis`s answer a week earlier...

The camera was on, though it`s possible at the time of the flooding it was on stand by. No idea if it make any difference.

As it were, the first thing that came to mind was to get the card dry and so I did.

I reallize now I should have rinsed it with fresh water first.

Delkin Devices, the card manifacturer refered me to MediaRecover who specializes in this sort of thing, I hope they can recover the data for me. At least if they can`t it won`t cost me anything, if they can they`ll charge by the size of the card.