Corrupted Photos - Cause, Cure??
 

Issue-A half dozen digital photos on my laptop when opened were corrupted to the point of ruin

Facts-Four year old Dell Inspiron 1564

Running Windows 7 Home Premium which includes Microsoft Office Picture Manager

Photo Source-snips or right clicks of internet photos, and one snapshot taken from Xmas Drone. I do not think any of those taken with digital camera have gone bad, but am afraid to check for fear of further damage.

The degradation of the quality varies from one to another. Some have vivid green stripes, others appear to be a jigsaw puzzle fragmentation of the photo.

An attempt to attach three of them to an email to send to an expert for analysis resulted in only one of the three being able to be opened, although all three thumbnails to appear on the sent copy of the email. [PS, have not yet heard back from said expert, hence this post]

Some Possible Causes Hopefully Eliminated-The graphics card has been hopefully eliminated as some photos open normally. [Due to concerns over other files being infected, have not used it much at all since this problem developed.]

Microsoft Security Essentials found no problems in a full scan, so if it is a virus, it was not picked up.

I think all the infected photos were in one specific folder on the desktop awaiting further filing. Is it possible for a single folder to somehow become corrupted? The same folder also contained some video shot from the drone which worked initially but now shows ‘encountered a problem’.

To my knowledge, almost all of the 75,000 or more photos HAVE been backed up previously on external hard drives as well as other laptops. My plan to do a massive, comprehensive backup of ALL of them today was put on hold by the suggestion that I might be replicating the problem and infecting other storage areas.

I think I am too old to get a mac. I know that at some point I will need to find and learn to use an editing program which will replace the picture editing program which is apparently no longer supported.

Any suggestions and comments will be examined and almost always appreciated. Thank you.

Since you mention those affected are all in one folder I would be inclined to check the hard drive for faults.

If you're lucky, all the contents of that folder might be in one sector.

Thank you.

How does one check hard drive for faults in this instance?

I don't know the answer to this, but I do know that if there is corruption of the drive it can get worse, and may do every time that it is accessed. I'd strongly recommend not using the machine at all until you get a diagnosis.

You need to run CHKDSK

This may help you

The How-To Geek Guide to Using Check Disk in Windows 7 or Vista

Thank you both for your helpful replies. I did receive a phone call from the guy I sent the pix to who agreed: "Hard drive fart...get your stuff off it as quick as you can".

We will then try to make a mirror image of the thing which would include not only windows 7 with which I am so comfortable, but also the version of Word that I am used to and also, hopefully, the office picture managing program.

Thanks again.

Although it won't help recover any files, if you're interested there are plenty of tools that will report the SMART status of your drive: this is one example. It will show you the drive's own log of disk performance and errors. It's a reputable source. The manufacturer of your drive will probably have a similar free tool available. It's a bit more info that Windows doesn't pass on to the user (or, indeed, act on itself until it's too late).

STOP FIDDLING
 

I get the idea that these images are important or very important to you. If that is the case:-

1.
Stop fiddling.

2.
Get professional level data recovery help from people who do it every day.

They will image the drive and may for example be able to recover previously deleted versions of the files.

I think that you can get that sort of service for £100 or so.

I have never used them but I liked the look of this mob's website Data Recovery Specialists UK, Data Recovery Lab - Our Recovery Team. They offer a file repair service but I doubt that they can fix jpegs but I am not sure.

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Some further comments. I DO NOT RECOMMEND TRYING TO DO IT YOURSELF if the files are of value.

You cannot do this on a live system disk, you need to put the disk in another computer, perhaps in a USB caddy thingy.

I damaged a hard disk a while back by moving it when it was operating (by accident) and considered getting professional help. I instead fixed it myself. I was very fortunate that the damage was confined to the root directory and all files were in easily findable (by the recovery software) subdirectories. I got 100% recovery with an investment in £15 of software and some hours/days of head scratching and general panic. I have been doing data recovery for decades on a very occasional basis but have forgotten nearly everything I ever knew and file systems have become ever more complex.

In this case I knew the cause of the problem (stupidity:-) and was confident that by examining the disk I was not damaging it further. This is not the position in your circumstances.

This is the software I bought a 30 day license for
Data Recovery Software and Forensic disk tools from CnW Recovery

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List of PC tools I saved sometime recently - no idea if they are any good:-

http://pcsupport.about.com/od/filere...y-programs.htm

Bit rot - Data degradation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

No solution other than having backups.

Mac

:sad: