Photo recovery after crash
 

Laptop crash and IT bods have managed to salvage photos, all the icons showing up but when click on the it gives me only half the picture with clusters missing.

Any suggestions to overcome this or remedies.

thanks

Does this happen to just one picture? or all pictures?

If the former, then you're SOL.
If the latter, then there's something wrong with your picture viewer, as a hard drive crash is never going to affect portions of a whole bunch of files in the same way.

Also, when you say "icons" do you mean thumbnails? in which case I assume the thumbnails are autogenerated? i.e. where do you see these "icons"?

Erm...see if you can search back to my HD fail thread. It's exactly what happened to me. Thumbnails were there, but in many cases, no pics. Half way through a folder, one or two perfect pictures would be there.

One of the utils I tried was a $49 program that offered a freebie go - it only allowed one at time. Very looooong procedure. It worked! So, the implication was, that if you paid, it would have been a solution. The cheepies - the few that I tried - simply did not work.

In my case, there were so many backups, my only problem was where the @#$^%@ were they? Even to what country were they in...etc.. It was easier to seek the backups than to restore the lost ones.

I lost my HD after installing W7 on a newer drive and using the old drive as a second unit. It was NOT configured as a slave, but was switched via the BIOS to be the boot drive or not. It was when I allowed CHKDSK to run into the old drive that the damage was done. Coincidence? Maybe...but another poster had the same thing happen shortly afterwords.

If the thumbnail list is corrupt, simply deleting the thumbs.db file found in the same folder will force a rebuild.

That's interesting. Can you elaborate?

A hidden file called thumbs.db is kept within each folder in a Windows file system where a thumbnail view has been requested.

It's basically a database of thumbnail views of the fullsize image files in that folder, and is read from in order to present the thumbnails quickly rather than using processing power to re-generate the thumbnails every time you visit that folder.

If it doesn't exist, then Windows will re-create it. It is known to become corrupt (where clicking on a thumbnail of one picture will actually load another picture entirely), and this is the way to fix it. Its a hidden file though, so you won't get to see it unless you turn on "Show hidden files and folders" in the view options in Explorer.

That's interesting. It certainly would have been a sensible place to start.

My comment 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.

Not in itself, but if you consider a folder with 10 image files sat in it. If it has a corrupted thumbs.db file it could be misrepresenting what's in those 10 files, or it could even avoid showing you them (depending upon the internal operations of Windows etc). Therefore, you could be in a situation whereby you're relying upon the thumbs.db which is telling you the files are junk, and you delete the folder based upon this false information.

Thead drift, Mike, but Avid video editing can produce a similar problem (on its own!)
After corrupt database referencing to MXF clips one has to delete the MS access file, and it will then rebuild (accurately)..
tedious

Only some

Seeing the thumbnails when I click on the list files and details.

PC Inspector's free Photo Recovery has always worked for me until a few weeks ago. I tested and then bought Easeus Data Recovery. Not cheap, but it worked very well. Having used Easeus' other products, I assume Easeus Data Recovery is a clone of another commercial product, but I don't know which one.

Try stellar phoenix photo recovery software which work well for me I buy this software from their site which cost me $39 but money doesn't matter to me photo's are important to me because I am a Photographer.
I think company site is Photo Recovery Software, Digital Picture Recovery, Memory Card Recovery