Question: How can I recover some corrupted data?

Hankins — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 11:01:52 -0800

I'm hoping to recover some corrupted files that (I think) got messed up during a transfer to a Firewire drive. Could you be a lamb and step inside? About a month ago, I copied a bunch of files from by Powerbook's HD to a Firewire drive (1000 files, 3.5GB). As the copying began, my Powerbook's lid accidentally shut. When I opened it back up, the copy dialogue sat there for a while before resuming (and completing) as normal. Or so I thought.

I tried accessing these files the other day, and surprise! The files cannot be read. I would think there's some sort of CRC at play that would render this closed-lid hypothesis invalid, but it seems too coincidental that it happened to precisely the two directories that were involved during the accidental laptop-shut.

For what it's worth, these are Canon Camera RAW files. And while there's a lot of solutions out there for recovering deleted/undeleted image files, they unfortunately don't fit my situation -- namely because I've already overwritten the CF card at least 20 times. I tried Photorescue on my laptop's free HD space (and the firewire drive), but it didn't find anything. When I browse these directories with a RAW-browser, some of them have half-thumbnails, while most show nothing at all.

What makes me hopeful is that the amount of data that's deemed unreadable (3.5GB) falls very much in line with how much data *should* be there. In my primitive data-management mind, this sounds promising, yet I don't want to be too optimistic.

Yesterday, I opened up a corrupted and uncorrupted file side-by-side in a HEX editor, but I admittedly don't know wtf I'm looking for. Interestingly, the corrupted ones seem to have more friendly/readable meta-data (exif), while the uncorrupted files rarely show anything but unreadable hex-jargon. Any suggestions you could provide would be delightful.

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Question: How can I recover some corrupted data?