JPG file repair/rescue/recovery. Please help.

[BigV]

See that little guy? That's me. And, yes, it hurts. I hope someone here can make it stop. Please.

I have a hard drive with many many pictures on it. I can not open the picture files. No way, no how, uh uh, nope, nada, zip, zero, zilch.

The drive was removed from a system that is long gone now. The drive is readily accessible. I have it installed in a new computer and can read from it fine. I hesitate to write to it for fear of further corrupting the files.

I have successfully copied the files to another physical hard drive and I'm working on those copies. The directory structure is intact, the files all appear to be fine, the extension is correct, but when I try to open the files with *any* graphics application, it chokes. Can't display the image.

I have tried about 5 different file rescue tools, and they're all great, *if* your problem is accidental deletion. Nice to know that works, but it's not working for my problem. The most informative error message was from GIMP. When I tried to load a couple of the copies of the messed up files, GIMP failed and returned the following error.

JPEG Image message
Not a JPEG file: starts with 0xd5 0x2c

or different file...

JPEG Image message
Not a JPEG file: starts with 0x00 0x00

and so on and so on....

I suspect the pictures are still there, but somehow.... I just don't know. I think the FAT or whatever the NTFS equivalent is is hashed. The drive was the slave in the previous system. I had the two drives lashed together in some logical way that has crippled the part I still have. Example: there are mp3 files on the hd too. When I try to play one, sometimes it just fails out of the gate, sorry, not a valid media file, etc etc. Some files, though, it WILL play. Well, heh, music comes out but it's (really) weird. The filename does not correspond to what's coming out of the speakers. It's a different song. From some entirely different place on the disk. And, it plays part of the song then jumps to the middle of some different song. For a little while, then does it again. Like if you were to sample your music collection across and not through, y'know? Poor description, I know. Sorry. Instead of playing the song in a strictly linear fashion, it plays a little bit of the song, then it's like the computer got it's instructions for the next part of the song crossed up and just picked up the beat in some adjacent song, or disk, or file, completely unrelated to the previous section. Unrelated to my ears, but just hunky dory for the computer.

My next inclination is to get hold of some disk editor and try to follow the internal structure of the files. That will be an education. Any JPG file structure experts out there? Please, don't be shy.

Oh, by the way, google searches for jpg file repair returned many hits that were obviously lures to nsfw sites. Not a fruitful search.

I am willing to re-rip all the mp3s but the jpgs are not replaceable.

I would be very grateful for any help.

[Hobbs]

If you're luckey, your files are only missing the header information which sometimes is easily fixed.

Try this link
I think I tried this before and it works ok. Unfortunately, it's not free (to the tune of $149 a pop) and the demo will only allow you to recover files up to a certain size. But I must warn you, even the files that I did get to recover, most of them were pretty messed up; odd colors, truncated, split images (left on right-right on left). The wife had some pictures on a memory stick that went bad while in the camera. After all my sweat and hard work, the pictures were just too messed up to use. What a nightmare.

I feel your pain brotha!