This is SAD
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This is SAD
Posting computer questions here that is - BUT after three weeks of trying to recover broken images on my laptops HDD i am at my wits end and about to give up so here goes.
Just back from sailing in the Caribbean where we left one hatch on breathe and under this hatch was all our clothes in the hanging locker being saturated by seawater. The Admiral SWMBO had a freaky fit BUT then we discovered the laptop at the bottom of the locker [ yes i put it in there so it would not get thrown about as i knew we was going to be having a wild ride] and YES we was thumping along pretending we were a submarine driving the bows under the waves. It was blowing 25 knots and the seas were typical square wave horrible Caribbean seas. We eventually gave up on the big white things and started to heat the water and chill the fridge freezer - going down below the admiral discovered the 'problem'. The clothes got washed and dried but the laptop was 'killed' I dried it out and left it for dead BUT on the flight home i had a wee look at it and i could almost see text on the screen but it was one of these MS error messages "cant find boot disc" or something like that. Got it home and took the laptop apart and removed the HDD. The laptop is dead BUT i have a USB case and harness that takes laptop drives so i swapped drives and connected it to my desktop expecting things to be OK...........Yes i could see the two partitioned drives but that was it. On looking at the properties of these drives they were of zero size and raw..........This is a 160GB drive partitioned as two logical NTFS drives one for programs one for data 'mostly' JPEG images of our times in the Caribbean weather sat pics weather text and lots of technical boat stuff.Text HTML and PDF's. I ran a few free..........well free to investigate...........data recovery programs and yes they could see the files.... and they were recoverable however when i ran one for images.......they showed images/thumbnails of the 'recoverable' files and it looks like 14,000+ JPEG images were totally corrupt [no i 'now' dont have a back up of all these images - see later disaster] in the following manner - images broken up - colour/multiple band(s) on the images and about 30/60% of the bottom of the image a grey mass. This being the case i did not purchase the file recovery program. However i wonder if there is software out there that can recover these images - GIF's all show perfectly so it is something to do with the way JPEG's are encoded i think - probably a [corrupt] file header or something like that. I have got a few recovered 'faulty' images that i got from the memory card that i had put in my other pocket sized digital camera. However the camera bag with one of the other cameras in it was left in the taxi to the airport or stolen at the airport - we dont know which - it had all the back ups in it as well as a rather nice Olympus 5060WZ and about 10 mem cards and two USB back up drives.and and and.
Any/All help appreciated to recover the images of course.............unless you know where the camera bag went
Thanks in anticipation
Just back from sailing in the Caribbean where we left one hatch on breathe and under this hatch was all our clothes in the hanging locker being saturated by seawater. The Admiral SWMBO had a freaky fit BUT then we discovered the laptop at the bottom of the locker [ yes i put it in there so it would not get thrown about as i knew we was going to be having a wild ride] and YES we was thumping along pretending we were a submarine driving the bows under the waves. It was blowing 25 knots and the seas were typical square wave horrible Caribbean seas. We eventually gave up on the big white things and started to heat the water and chill the fridge freezer - going down below the admiral discovered the 'problem'. The clothes got washed and dried but the laptop was 'killed' I dried it out and left it for dead BUT on the flight home i had a wee look at it and i could almost see text on the screen but it was one of these MS error messages "cant find boot disc" or something like that. Got it home and took the laptop apart and removed the HDD. The laptop is dead BUT i have a USB case and harness that takes laptop drives so i swapped drives and connected it to my desktop expecting things to be OK...........Yes i could see the two partitioned drives but that was it. On looking at the properties of these drives they were of zero size and raw..........This is a 160GB drive partitioned as two logical NTFS drives one for programs one for data 'mostly' JPEG images of our times in the Caribbean weather sat pics weather text and lots of technical boat stuff.Text HTML and PDF's. I ran a few free..........well free to investigate...........data recovery programs and yes they could see the files.... and they were recoverable however when i ran one for images.......they showed images/thumbnails of the 'recoverable' files and it looks like 14,000+ JPEG images were totally corrupt [no i 'now' dont have a back up of all these images - see later disaster] in the following manner - images broken up - colour/multiple band(s) on the images and about 30/60% of the bottom of the image a grey mass. This being the case i did not purchase the file recovery program. However i wonder if there is software out there that can recover these images - GIF's all show perfectly so it is something to do with the way JPEG's are encoded i think - probably a [corrupt] file header or something like that. I have got a few recovered 'faulty' images that i got from the memory card that i had put in my other pocket sized digital camera. However the camera bag with one of the other cameras in it was left in the taxi to the airport or stolen at the airport - we dont know which - it had all the back ups in it as well as a rather nice Olympus 5060WZ and about 10 mem cards and two USB back up drives.and and and.
Any/All help appreciated to recover the images of course.............unless you know where the camera bag went
Thanks in anticipation
Join Date: Jul 2008
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The one I'd recommend trying is:
PhotoRescue Home Page - PhotoRescue Wizard, PhotoRescue Expert, PhotoRescue Advanced
Free to try and you should see thumbnails of what it could recover.
Do not tick the box that says to cache the disk before searching in your case (as it would try and copy 80 gigs)
If that doesn't work then it's pretty unlikely you could get the images back successfully I'd say. You could try the advanced version of it at a push as that allows you to start moving data blocks around to try and make pictures up from fragmented data.
See here for an example of what it does:
photorescue-menu-2004.gif
PhotoRescue Home Page - PhotoRescue Wizard, PhotoRescue Expert, PhotoRescue Advanced
Free to try and you should see thumbnails of what it could recover.
Do not tick the box that says to cache the disk before searching in your case (as it would try and copy 80 gigs)
If that doesn't work then it's pretty unlikely you could get the images back successfully I'd say. You could try the advanced version of it at a push as that allows you to start moving data blocks around to try and make pictures up from fragmented data.
See here for an example of what it does:
photorescue-menu-2004.gif
Last edited by bit-twiddler; 8th Sep 2009 at 20:04.
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CapitainKirk,
Sorry to hear your tale of woe.
Unfortunatley, unless you've got a bit of cash to burn, this sounds like one of those "live & learn" events.
If you do have cash to burn, send it off to a reputable digital forensics organisation and you might be surprised at what they can get back from a seemingly dead-end scenario. No guarantees of course, but they've got access to a wider variety of tools to choose from then you could ever have.
Sorry to hear your tale of woe.
Unfortunatley, unless you've got a bit of cash to burn, this sounds like one of those "live & learn" events.
If you do have cash to burn, send it off to a reputable digital forensics organisation and you might be surprised at what they can get back from a seemingly dead-end scenario. No guarantees of course, but they've got access to a wider variety of tools to choose from then you could ever have.
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Sadly i have tried Photo Rescue - it does look good and would i think be the only program that will allow me to rebuild the images. However it does not see the physical drive it only sees the logical drives but cant see how big they are and what format they are [as the format is corrupt on the drives] and i dont know what info to input to let it look at the drive and find the files if i take the custom option - the only programs that showed anything [corrupt JPEG's] after 4 days of looking at the 160GB HDD were -
http://the-undelete.com/digital_photo_recovery.exe
http://the-undelete.com/ntfs_data_recovery.exe
They look really good BUT only recover 'the [corrupt] files' they will not NOT rebuild/repair broken JPEG's like Photo Rescue seems able to do and which is what i need.
I have a few free programs that recover deleted images and they work fine with Mem Cards and formatted HDD's but my HDD 's format is corrupt as well.
Lexar - Softwareimage_rescue3
CONVAR & PCinspector Data Recovery Datenrettung recupero dati datarecovery rcupration donnesfile_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
As a last option i will reformat the HDD and see what happens next.
thanks for your suggestions
And being Scottish i really dont want to send the HDD off to someone who is going to charge me silly money to recover 14,000 files one by one and rebuild them. When we go to the boat we generally take four bags and we know that we need to have a good mix of clothes in each bag - had the Terminal Five/ BA lost bags fun so many times now and we have flown Lost In Another Terminal as well - it would seem i need to have multiple file copies in a few locations if i want to be sure my photos dont get lost.
http://the-undelete.com/digital_photo_recovery.exe
http://the-undelete.com/ntfs_data_recovery.exe
They look really good BUT only recover 'the [corrupt] files' they will not NOT rebuild/repair broken JPEG's like Photo Rescue seems able to do and which is what i need.
I have a few free programs that recover deleted images and they work fine with Mem Cards and formatted HDD's but my HDD 's format is corrupt as well.
Lexar - Softwareimage_rescue3
CONVAR & PCinspector Data Recovery Datenrettung recupero dati datarecovery rcupration donnesfile_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
As a last option i will reformat the HDD and see what happens next.
thanks for your suggestions
And being Scottish i really dont want to send the HDD off to someone who is going to charge me silly money to recover 14,000 files one by one and rebuild them. When we go to the boat we generally take four bags and we know that we need to have a good mix of clothes in each bag - had the Terminal Five/ BA lost bags fun so many times now and we have flown Lost In Another Terminal as well - it would seem i need to have multiple file copies in a few locations if i want to be sure my photos dont get lost.
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I take it you've also tried the recovery tools on something like hirens boot cd
Info here: Hiren and Pankaj's Homepage » www.hiren.info
You might be able to get the partition info recreated from that and then use a different app.
Photorescue is excellent but does have issues due to it's intended use of running on data from memory cards.
Info here: Hiren and Pankaj's Homepage » www.hiren.info
You might be able to get the partition info recreated from that and then use a different app.
Photorescue is excellent but does have issues due to it's intended use of running on data from memory cards.
