File recovery help - corrupted pictures. Please help!!!

[flipz]

Hi all. I hope someone out there can help me with some file recovery!!

My fiance took my SD card to get pictures printed off of it a few months ago. CVS's machine was down so she took it to walmart. Anyways, while the card was in their kodak machine the whole thing crashed and corrupted my card!! I generally ALWAYS back up my pictures first but had been busy and she took the camera when I wasn't home so I wasn't able to say "let me back those up first".

Well the card was completely :censor: up, and windows just wanted to format it. I immediatly downloaded 3 or 4 picture recovery tools. Some of them actually worked, and it pulled the pictures off. I was so excited!! However that was the end of the excitement. I was able to pull off about 30 pictures, all but 3 work fine when in "Thumbnail" mode in windows explorer. The problem is that when I actually open it I get "drawing failed" from windows picture viewer, and "image corrupt" from adobe photoshop. How is it corrupt if the thumbnails work fine? As far as I know there is no actual thumbnail information in the picture, windows just looks at it and then scales it down.

Can ANYONE help with this?! This was actually a few months back (haven't had time to mess with it!) so it's probably too late to try recovering anymore pictures off the card. But if anyone can recommend a program it's worth a shot. I can't even remember all the ones I've tried.

Like I said I have these 30 pictures backed up on my harddrive. When I preview them 27 are full, complete pictures. But when I try to open them, they are all corrupt. Is there some way to fix this.

PLEASE HELP!!! Some of these aren't pics that I can just go take again.

Thanks to everyone!!!!

-brent

 

[William]

I would reccomend easy recovery pro, but that costs.


Its a powerful tool tho, I've restored files from several formats previous and had them be 100% intact

 

[Jchillin]

What you are getting is the "ghost" image from when the picture was last viewed. What you need is the program William is describing.

Whenever you view or save a file to your hard drive, a footprint (ghost) is also created. This footprint will remain forever. If you look in your temp folder, you will see these .jpeg ghosts.

 

[flipz]

Well I'm downloading a "trial" version right now.

I wish I had known about it months ago when this happened! I hope all the pics I need haven't been overwritten by now.

Any tips on using this program or is it pretty straight forward?

-brent

PS- It's version 6.00.09 incase that makes any difference

EDIT: Well it seems to be a no-go. In all of the recovery modes it never even pulls up my SD card as an option to scan. Maybe it has something to do with this program being from 2002, so it's not recognizing. So I went into "advance mode" which is just supposed to scan the card for any sort of file system, and it says it didn't find one. Even though right now the card is completely fine and working. But for un-delete and un-format and all those, it doesn't even let me pick my card. :x

 

[Jchillin]

Your card is USB connected I assume...does windows detect it at all?

 

[flipz]

The card is plugged in through the media reader on my printer.

All works well, and the card is fine. It was only messed up when walmarts machine crashed. But I've reformatted it since then.

The version of easyrecovery pro that I had was from 2002. I just downloaded the newest version (6.04.08 ) and it sees it. I was doing something but then cancelled it, and went back to do it and now it just keeps crashing. I'm going to uninstall and reinstall in a bit.

Just an FYI, I do know comps and all. I work on them for a living. 8)

 

[Jchillin]

Oh, I didn't see that the first time...the re-format could have and should have completely erased the card. It's the same when you format a floppy disk.

 

[flipz]

I did a quick-format. So technically it only re-writes the beginning of the drive, and all the info is still there. It's never really gone until it's been overwritten like 6 times. lol

When I get this program working I'll let you know if I have any progress.

 

[Jchillin]

Sounds good.

Good luck

 

[William]

Actually, It dosn't matter. As I said before, I've recovered files from several reformats ago, and my harddrive is always full up to the last gig.


I don't know how the card reader on your printer works, but your computer SHOULD see it as just harddrive. [ Like USB thumb drives ] so it can scan propperly.

 

[flipz]

It's working on it now. It says it found 110 files but the "status" of all of them is an X. I'm not sure what that means, but it doesn't sound good. haha. But it's 250 megs of data and it's kind of taking a while.

For some reason the older version of the software didn't see it... but this new one does.

 

[Jchillin]

That's at least a positive sign....by jove...it just might work! Keep pluggin.

 

[flipz]

Well it ended up recovering 105 files... some of which of course were pictures that I still actually had on my card.

Out of all those, it only succesfully recovered 2 of the pictures 100% and one more about 95%. So I'm happy about that, but it didn't recover any of the ones that I really wanted.

I wish I had posted about this months ago when this happened. Like I said I tried 5+ different programs, but even being the day that it happened, they didn't recover ANY of the pictures 100%. So I think I would have had more luck.

Well thanks for the help guys. I'll just be happy to have the 2.95 pics. :?

-brent

 

[Jchillin]

Hmmm...although not 100% successful, it's more than I thought you would get. Now it's time to challenge the retailer to a duel (j/k). Is there any warranty (written or implied) regarding damage to hardware while in their possession or is it too late for that?

 

[flipz]

Yea... they aren't responsible, blah blah, by using their service you take all responsibilities, blah.

Here's the two 100% ones that I was able to pull off:
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/15287805/
http://www.deviantart.com/deviation/15287921/

Although deviantart's picture server is being crap right now so it only loads the pics half the time.

Unfortunatly the ones that didn't get pulled off were ones of a vacation my fiance and I took. :x

-brent

 

[Jchillin]

Unfortunately I cannot access your links from work (those darn IT people...grrr), but I will check when I get home.

Thanks for sharing!