Boy am I in trouble

[sandie]

Ok, last Sunday I opened my computer and it said it could not find my "Personal Profile". That meant NO pictures, NO documents, NO favorites YIKES!!!!!!!!!! So I bought some recovery software and went to work. which showed me that the pictures were there(not all but many) NO GO, so I went to work and the computer people got the picturres on my hard drive BUT MANY said it could not open the type of JPEG so what good is that? They then went to Picassa and that program opened the pictures BUT now all the pictures that they opened with Picassa and saved back to MY PICTURES are in thumbnail with very small files which are about 2x3 inches big, YIKES again.
Any ideas to recover the pictures to their original size like 3-15 megapixels?

[msbrad]

Oh geee, I do feel for you.
There are several experts around here, but I am not one of them.
contact Lee

http://www.thedigitalphotoguy.com/

He may be able to help you. He has written on this forum things that deal with recovery.
Best of luck.
m

[genevh]

Sounds like the file allocation tables may have gotten messed up somehow. That drive may have been going bad and it finally went. As long as you aren't trying to use it any more, the data should be there, but it may take professional help to recover it. There are some tools out there that may help, but I am not real familiar with them. Just don't try to use it in the mean time other than read from it. And you will want to limit that to a bare minimum.

This is a real good time to remember to have a backup system in place, and do it regularly. I know I need to do it more, especially with the new granddaughter....lots more pictures to protect!

[Carbone]

I don't recall, are you on a Mac or on a PC ?

Ray

[Zata_Jones]

For the recovery of Picture from windows opertating system you can use.
Stellar Phoenix Digital Media Recovery - Photo Recovery Software
Can download the demo from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/digital-media-recovery.htm
From MAC O.S use
Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery - Mac Photo Recovery Software
Download the demo from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/mac-photo-recovery.htm

Hope they will solve your purpose.

[NickLewis]

Hi Sandie,

Be very careful what you are doing with recovery software. Ideally, it should be run from a drive other than the one you are trying to recover the data from.

This is because if the operating system's record of what is where on your hard drive is corrupted, then the installation and operation of the recovery software itself may overwrite the very data you are trying to recover.....

I'm afraid I can't offer you any more advice. Only once have I tried to do this, with very similar results to the ones you describe. Namely many files identified as JPGs but unreadable, and many pictures recovering only as thumbnails. Fortunately, there were no valuable images involved, and the person concerned was happy to abandon the attempt.

Good luck

Nick

[Zata_Jones]

Stellar Phoenix is a NON-DESTRUCTIVE and READ ONLY software.
It doesn't write on the hard drive from which you are doing the recovery.
You have to make your infected hard drive as slave and have to run the software on the master drive. After running the software, it will start the scan process. The utility will scan the whole hard drive and display the result in tree structure form, making the file and folder easy for navigation. The deleted data is shown marked as 'deleted'. So through demo version you will be able to see the recoverd data. You can save your scan result and can use latter when you get the full version to save the data.

Best of luck.

[zlatan24]

This cool program for image recovery (http://www.oemailrecovery.com/photo_recovery.html). Flash Recovery Toolbox know how to recover image from SD card, Flash card and other media cards.