That's interesting. It certainly would have been a sensible place to start.
My comment
Thumbnails were there, but in many cases, no pics. Half way through a folder, one or two perfect pictures would be there.
This was meant to say: The Thumbnails were there - one or two perfect
full size pictures would be there.
Could the rebuilding of the thumbs.db have in any way restored the associated main picture?
I have no way of checking now, ( I formatted the disk after the failure and have not really used it as the boot disk - except for quick tests now and then.)
However, the way the utility seemed to be piecing together the data was reminiscent of the old Lost Clusters procedure. Certainly, it seemed to be taking a lot of effort to put the data back in some sort of order.