Damaged Files

[batookee]

I recently took some photos with my Canon s45 and someone accidentaly formated my card; losing some 250 photos. I continued to take pictures on this card after it had been formated and I then took it to a photo shop where they were able to recover some of the pictures that had been formated.

When I view the recoverd files in a Windows XP folder in thumbnail view, they are fine. I can see them no problem and there seems to be no damage to them. When I open a "bad" file and Windows opens it up in the built in picture viewer it's either cut off at the top and the bottom is gray or there are a bunch of parts of diffrent pictues mixed up in one.

I have included a sample in the link bellow and you can clearly see that this file is damaged. But if you save it and view it in a folder under thumbnail view, you should be able to see it right.
http://www.demonik.ca/badpics/

Does anyone know a way to fix this? Perhaps a way to recover damaged JPEG files? If anyone could help me out it would be greatly asppreciated.


Thank you,
Sebastien Couture
batookee@nbnet.nb.ca

[Conk]

I have a feeling that the information that completed this photo is missing. Have you tried a file recovery program yourself? It may be a good idea but don't put any more images on this card until you are satisfied that you've got all you are going to from the lost files.
Use Google and search for a program. Somebody here may be able to suggest a good one.

[rhibbert]

The best file recovery utility I know of is R-Studio which you will find at http://www.r-tt.com/ It is worth every penny. Their basic package (R-Undelete) might be all that you need. These packages only work on PCs running Windows.

You will also need a device to connect your card to your PC (eg Card Reader) which will then treat the card as a hard drive. You just need to restore the appropriate disc.

As Conk says, the secret to good file recovery is not to write to the card after getting into trouble.

Good Luck

Richard

[batookee]

Thanks Guys, the pictures are already off the card though so will that matter?

[henkbos]

You can download R-Undelete as demo. Try it out. As you can select your drive you should be able to use it.
I've used R-Undelete once and saw pictures from 3 formats ago!

[rhibbert]

The only way to find out is to download the program and give it a go. R-Undelete is free, so you have nothing to lose.

A little technical background...

Flash Cards are basically treated as oversize floppy disks and are formatted in the same way by Windows. Smaller CF cards are formatted FAT16, which is the good old DOS standard. Larger cards (>2GB) have to be formatted FAT32 (like Windows 98 ) .

When the camera/computer deletes a file, all it does is change the first character of the filename, so that it knows that this portion of the disk/card is free. It doesn't delete the data. Similarly, FORMAT writes that data structure onto the disk/card and doesn't write to every cell. The next time the camera/computer writes something to the disk/card, it looks for the first free portion and starts writing. Each file (picture) occupies as many portions (sectors) as necessary.

When you corrupt a disc/card, there is generally an error in the FAT, so the camera/computer writes to sectors that are already used by other files and you get data corruption. In earlier varieties of Windows, you can run a utility called SCANDISK which checks the FAT for mistakes and recovers files as best it can. In Windows NT and XP you can do the same thing by opening Explorer, right clicking on the drive icon and selecting properties. There will be a tab labelled "Tools". Click on this and select the Error Checking option.


And now how to fix it...


R-Undelete and R-Studio are much more powerful tools than the standard Windows default. They let you recover the file and give it a proper name, rebuild a file from bits etc. How much data you retrieve will depend on how much data has been overwritten by subsequent save operations to your card. You may be pleasantly surprised.

The first thing to do is to create a disk image. Save this to your hard drive. This will be an identical copy of your CF card. ***THE LESS YOU WRITE TO A CARD AFTER CORRUPTING IT, THE HIGHER YOUR CHANCES OF RECOVERING ANY DATA*** Once you have done that, have R-Studio analyze your CF card. It will rebuild as many files as it can. Again, save its results to your hard drive. You can then look at the files to see what is still there. If you make a mistake, then just use the program to restore the disk image back to your CF card and you are where you started.

The usual way to corrupt a disk is to remove it while the system is writing to it, or removing it with power on. Make sure that you always 'eject' the card from Explorer (right click on drive icon and select Eject) before removing it from your card reader or power down your camera.

[batookee]

Hey everyone, I think that you didn't quite understand my original post. The pictures have already been recovered off the card and are on my hard drive; only a few are damaged (you can see the top but the bottom is gray). What I'm trying to recover is the gray part but from what rhibbert just explained I'm gessing it's impossible since that part of the file has probably been overwriten. I tryied to fix them with the trail version of R-Undelete but the resutls where the same as the original files.

The only thing i dont understad though is why in the Windows thumbnail view the pictures are fine. It's a mistery to me... Here's an other example of what I mean:

http://www.demonik.ca/badpics/badpic1.gif
http://www.demonik.ca/badpics/badpic2.gif

Hopes this makes my problem a little more obvious.

Thank you for the input!

[rhibbert]

Not sure as I don't know how jpg files are encrypted, but it is possible that the thumbnail is stored as part of the file and this has not been corrupted.

Maybe someone else knows.

Richard

[rhibbert]

I'm not sure if this utility is any better than R-Undelete, but it is specifically aimed at retrieveing image files. You might give it a try and report back.

http://www.datarescue.com/photorescue/ (Shareware $29)

Richard