Damaged JPG Suggestions for recovery. Thumbnail o.k. unreadable.

Hello,

I recently had a problem with my Canon S400's memory card door
interrupting power during saves, causing corrupted files.

One such file I cannot recover. I have tried Zero Assumption
Recovery's tool, which worked on others, to no avail.

I can view a thumbnail of the file o.k. However, I cannot open it with
any viewer I have tried.
When I try to open it, I can see just the first 1/16th or less of the
very top of the picture.
The file is a little big, compared to others, about 2.4 MB as opposed
to almost exaclty 2MB for other files from the camera.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

Hello Dave,
I have had similar problems and found that there is no one best recovery
programme. sometimes one works, another time a different one.
Recovermyfiles is pretty good most of the time.

Hope this helps,
Geoff.

"Dave Huber" wrote in message
s.com...
Hello,

I recently had a problem with my Canon S400's memory card door
interrupting power during saves, causing corrupted files.

One such file I cannot recover. I have tried Zero Assumption
Recovery's tool, which worked on others, to no avail.

I can view a thumbnail of the file o.k. However, I cannot open it with
any viewer I have tried.
When I try to open it, I can see just the first 1/16th or less of the
very top of the picture.
The file is a little big, compared to others, about 2.4 MB as opposed
to almost exaclty 2MB for other files from the camera.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dave

Dave Huber wrote:

I recently had a problem with my Canon S400's memory card door
interrupting power during saves, causing corrupted files.

One such file I cannot recover. I have tried Zero Assumption
Recovery's tool, which worked on others, to no avail.

I can view a thumbnail of the file o.k. However, I cannot open it with
any viewer I have tried.

Thumbnail is small and in the header, it usually survives no matter
what happens to the rest of the file. This is why you should slideshow
the main images to check them before deleting the originals from media.
Thumbnails are no indication of the main JPEG file integrity.

When I try to open it, I can see just the first 1/16th or less of the
very top of the picture.

That is characteristic of a damaged JPEG stream. It might be
recoverable manually but it is usually not economic unless the image is
irreplaceable or has commercial value.

The file is a little big, compared to others, about 2.4 MB as opposed
to almost exaclty 2MB for other files from the camera.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

If you send me a copy privately I can quickly tell you if the image
could be recovered.

It is worth checking that the bad file is not easily compressed by ZIP.
If it is compressible by more than 10% then all hope is lost and the
file contains mostly blank junk.

Moral of story don't eject media whilst a write cycle is in progress.
This is all too common with press photographers in the heat of the
moment.

Regards,
Martin Brown
(my unlikely looking from address is valid)

"Martin Brown" wrote in
oups.com:

Dave Huber wrote:

I recently had a problem with my Canon S400's memory card door
interrupting power during saves, causing corrupted files.

One such file I cannot recover. I have tried Zero Assumption
Recovery's tool, which worked on others, to no avail.

If the data never was written to the card, there is no reason to expect
_anything_ to work. See it like this: you take a pic of your grand-mother:
the pixels of her face don't make it to the card because you removed it.
How should the recovery program guess how grandma looks like?

the main images to check them before deleting the originals from media.
Thumbnails are no indication of the main JPEG file integrity.

Correct.

That is characteristic of a damaged JPEG stream. It might be
recoverable manually but it is usually not economic unless the image is
irreplaceable or has commercial value.

Yup. Manual recovery, for example for partially overwritten file or stuck
data lines is only worth the trouble for criminal stuff, plane crashes,
etc...

It is worth checking that the bad file is not easily compressed by ZIP.
If it is compressible by more than 10% then all hope is lost and the
file contains mostly blank junk.

Agreed, with some caveats in some circumstances: when the data made it to
the card in the first place and can't be read properly, trying another card
reader is always a good move.

Pierre/PhotoRescue