Help me save five months of memories?

March 23, 2006 11:38 AM

How can I fix the corrupted jpegs on my Win XP computer?

This tragedy begins, as so many do, with a disk repartitioning. Not only was the repartitioning aborted by the program, it rendered my NTFS partition unrecognizable. Via many different tools, I finally gained access -- but all my files were squished to 8.3 format (e.g., "DOCUME~1.TXT"). I backed 'em up to a FAT32 partition, reformatted and installed windows on the graveyard partition, and moved them back.

All of my restored files seem to be okay (excepting their names, of course) except for the JPGs, which cannot be opened in:

• Windows Preview ("Drawing failed")
• IrfanView, Firefox (opens partially, but bottom half is grey)
• Photoshop

Here's one of them.

The really weird thing is that I have a restored MS Word .doc that has embedded pictures... the document is fine, but the pictures are screwy!

I tried PixRecovery. No dice.

The EXIF data's all there, as is the thumbnail. The files seem to be about the correct size. How can I fix them? And if you can't tell me that, do you have any idea what happened?

posted by skryche to Computers & Internet (9 answers total)

Getting

"You don't have permission to access /tmp/20051009-1202.jpg on this server."

when I try to look at the example image.
posted by empyrean at 11:57 AM on March 23, 2006

Best answer: Do you have any big zip file recovered? Try uncompressing it (use winzip, winrar, or something like that, don't use windows' builtin decompressor), and see if there is any CRC error. It seems really odd to have this problem ONLY with jpegs...
posted by qvantamon at 12:17 PM on March 23, 2006

Response by poster: Huh. I clicked the link and got the same 403. Then I clicked it again, and the file came through. Give it another shot, empyrean.
posted by skryche at 1:27 PM on March 23, 2006

Nope. 404 for me, even through multiple requests...
posted by unixrat at 2:36 PM on March 23, 2006

403 - Doh.
posted by unixrat at 2:36 PM on March 23, 2006

Best answer: Chances are that you have a very small amount of random corruption through everything. JPEGs are just more obvious about it. Your MP3 collection has probably developed some pops and clicks too.
posted by krisjohn at 3:07 PM on March 23, 2006

Try Easy Recovery Pro - perhaps, just perhaps, it will be of help? Then, going forward, sort a backup routine out, and perhaps use an online service as well, to host your images. Hope you get 'em back!
posted by DrtyBlvd at 4:07 PM on March 23, 2006

In the future, you should really do a full backup before trying to repartition your hard drive!
posted by delmoi at 7:54 PM on March 23, 2006

Response by poster: krisjohn, I do think you must be right. Something like 1 in every hundred thousand bytes has an error. I found a zipfile and was able to unzip it, but when I looked at it more closely, I discovered that it did indeed have a CRC error. Blast!

delmoi -- yeah, I'll never make that mistake again. Things were just going so smoothly, you know? I'd put in a new videocard and upgraded my monitor without a hitch. I felt like I could take on the world.
posted by skryche at 9:57 AM on March 24, 2006