Need help! JPEGs from A80 - Corrupted???

[cosmoose]

Hi,

I just got back from a week of scuba diving and pulled the JPEGs off of my compact flash onto my hard drive. If I look at them as thumbnails the photos are fine, but when I try and open them in either XP's 'preview', Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop, the images are only visible in the top 2-5% of the photo and the rest is garbage.

Any ideas? Why would the photos be visible in thumbnail but not full size?

Any way I could 'fix' these files?

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Scott

[Jon]

Do they still look OK on the CF card in the camera? Can you zoom in on them there? How did you download the files - via card reader or direct from camera, and which software did you use?

[cosmoose]

Do they still look OK on the CF card in the camera? Can you zoom in on them there? How did you download the files - via card reader or direct from camera, and which software did you use?

CF on camera is corrupted, maybe I pulled it out of the reader without ejecting it using XP. I used a Lexar card reader, copying via a virtual drive letter using Windows Explorer and it seemed to copy 1 for 1 OK. Camera did not have problem displaying photos on LCD, though it does now. Why would the thumbnail view be OK if the entire JPEG is corrupted? I assume there is no way to recover the lost info? I am currently using ZAR and have tried PC Inspector Smart Recovery, both have recovered files, but all are the same, you can see a thumbnail view, but when you view the whole file it is bad.

Thanks,
Scott

I'm trying to attach a thumbnail view and a view of the whole file in PSP.

[dicky109]

CF on camera is corrupted, maybe I pulled it out of the reader without ejecting it using XP.

I don't think that will corrupt the card as I always just pull it out of the reader and never have a problem. What will corrupt it is if you pull it out of the camera or reader while it is being written to.

Can you open any shots on the card? A few years ago I had a problem with a card I shot at a friend's wedding on my G-1. The battery went dead, I guess while writing and I couldn't bring up any of the shots. I deleted the last file which I guess was corrupted and all the others suddenly came back to life. I don't know the technicality of why that worked, but don't care since it did.

Another JPEG adventure I had was when I couldn't open some files in a couple of folders which had been on my hard drive. I discovered that if I dragged the folder they were in to the desktop and then dragged them back to "My Pictures", they would now open. Again, the why is a mystery to me, but it worked.

Good luck,

[dyle]

CF on camera is corrupted, maybe I pulled it out of the reader without ejecting it using XP. I used a Lexar card reader, copying via a virtual drive letter using Windows Explorer and it seemed to copy 1 for 1 OK. Camera did not have problem displaying photos on LCD, though it does now. Why would the thumbnail view be OK if the entire JPEG is corrupted? I assume there is no way to recover the lost info? I am currently using ZAR and have tried PC Inspector Smart Recovery, both have recovered files, but all are the same, you can see a thumbnail view, but when you view the whole file it is bad.

Thanks,
Scott

I'm trying to attach a thumbnail view and a view of the whole file in PSP.

If it worked once before and now it's giving you the bad pic, the thumbnails may have saved it's info from the first time you inserted in the card in the computer. Not sure how often windows xp refreshes the thubmnail cache on a folder but I assume it saves it once and do not update it that often to save on reading time when you open a folder.

I got similar pics too when I was shooting and my battery died. It didn't affect the rest of the pics in my card though (I had an SD card camera so it might be different).

[cosmoose]

I did a little more checking and testing. I wiped the card after reclaiming what I could from it. I then took photos on (P) as I did when SCUBA diving, and then some on AUTO as I did with another card that worked fine. Any photos taken with AUTO on are fine, those taken with (P) are all the same and are corrupt. How could the camera not write correctly? If it helps, I could try and get the Programmed settings.

Additional info: it seems that it is only occurring on my Kingston CF Elite Pro 2GB 50x card. My smaller cards are not experiencing this problem.

Thanks,
Scott

[waussie]

Here is a very similar post http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=3325
My best guess is it's a computer problem, not a card problem. The images were OK or there is no way you would get good thumbnails.
I really doubt that there is a cache of thumbnails, my guess is that the are generated 'on the fly'.

[Jon]

XP creates a THUMBS.db file containing the thumbnails for a directory. This is only updated if you change the files on the directory. Thumbnails for existing files are re-generated if you delete the THUMBS.db or if you've checked "Do not cache thumbnails" under Tools | Folder Options in Explorer (in which case there's no THUMBS.db).

[cosmoose]

Hi, got it figured out. For some reason the USB CF reader was not supplying enough power to the 2GB drive. I used a PC card adapter in a notebook and it pulled them off just fine!!!

Thanks,
Scott

[Cindi]

Glad to hear that you got everything figured out. There is nothing worse than thinking you lost those irreplaceable pictures. I let my Mom borrow my camera last summer to take some pictures at a wedding. She had never used a digital camera before and the battery died and she was trying different things and it corrupted the card!! We ended up bringing it into a photo place and luckily they recoverd the pictures, but we were just sick to our stomachs thinking we lost them.