digital photo recovery

[sYs -- MAZ.boot]

Hello all,

Please pardon me if this has been addressed before. I'm not a
frequent visitor to either of these NGs, but here's my problem and I
hope someone can help...

The good news is that I was able to recover all of the digital photos
I thought I had lost when I stupidly reformatted what had been a RAID
0 array into two seperate drives on a newly upgraded computer. This
was done by a friend who ran Easy Recovery Pro after hooking up my
drives to his own computer. To be safe, he set it to recover every
..jpg file it could find and it came back with thousands; no surprise.

Among the thousands are my few hundred digital photos taken over the
past 3 years or so. Here's the problem: After saving all of the
photos to a folder on my own new hard drive, I can check their
properties and they're all about the right size for a 1600x1200 image
--about 400kb to 470kb, more or less. However, all of the digital
photos now have dimensions of 160x120. I tried opening them in
multiple programs, including photoshop, but the resolution is the
same. It just doesn't make sense for files that size to be 1/10th the
display dimensions they ought to be, so what happened to my digital
photos in the recovery process, and is this fixable?

Interestingly, this happened only to my digital photos. All other jpg
images recovered were recovered in their original size and dimensions.

Any ideas? I would greatly appreciate your help or advice.

Thank you.

s.y.salama

 

[Eric Gisin]

If you have two drives from a RAID array, you cannot recover anything from
separate drives. You have to recreate the RAID set.

Data recovery software will list files with proper sizes, but the data will be
garbage from other files.

 

[Ken Weitzel]

Hello all,

Please pardon me if this has been addressed before. I'm not a
frequent visitor to either of these NGs, but here's my problem and I
hope someone can help...

The good news is that I was able to recover all of the digital photos
I thought I had lost when I stupidly reformatted what had been a RAID
0 array into two seperate drives on a newly upgraded computer. This
was done by a friend who ran Easy Recovery Pro after hooking up my
drives to his own computer. To be safe, he set it to recover every
.jpg file it could find and it came back with thousands; no surprise.

Among the thousands are my few hundred digital photos taken over the
past 3 years or so. Here's the problem: After saving all of the
photos to a folder on my own new hard drive, I can check their
properties and they're all about the right size for a 1600x1200 image
--about 400kb to 470kb, more or less. However, all of the digital
photos now have dimensions of 160x120. I tried opening them in
multiple programs, including photoshop, but the resolution is the
same. It just doesn't make sense for files that size to be 1/10th the
display dimensions they ought to be, so what happened to my digital
photos in the recovery process, and is this fixable?

Interestingly, this happened only to my digital photos. All other jpg
images recovered were recovered in their original size and dimensions.

Any ideas? I would greatly appreciate your help or advice.

Thank you.

s.y.salama

Hi...

Except for the file size, it sounds like you're looking
at thumbnails...

Is it possible that you're looking at the filesize in
dos or with explorer or something, but actually opening
to view a thumb version stored elsewhere?

Ken

 

[Mark²]

Hello all,

Please pardon me if this has been addressed before. I'm not a
frequent visitor to either of these NGs, but here's my problem and I
hope someone can help...

The good news is that I was able to recover all of the digital photos
I thought I had lost when I stupidly reformatted what had been a RAID
0 array into two seperate drives on a newly upgraded computer. This
was done by a friend who ran Easy Recovery Pro after hooking up my
drives to his own computer. To be safe, he set it to recover every
.jpg file it could find and it came back with thousands; no surprise.

Among the thousands are my few hundred digital photos taken over the
past 3 years or so. Here's the problem: After saving all of the
photos to a folder on my own new hard drive, I can check their
properties and they're all about the right size for a 1600x1200 image
--about 400kb to 470kb, more or less. However, all of the digital
photos now have dimensions of 160x120. I tried opening them in
multiple programs, including photoshop, but the resolution is the
same. It just doesn't make sense for files that size to be 1/10th the
display dimensions they ought to be, so what happened to my digital
photos in the recovery process, and is this fixable?

Interestingly, this happened only to my digital photos. All other jpg
images recovered were recovered in their original size and dimensions.

Any ideas? I would greatly appreciate your help or advice.

Thank you.

Those sound like typical thumbnail versions created by many image-viewer
programs. Is it possible that you recovered the thumbnail jpegs, and NOT
the original files associated with them?

 

[Martin Brown]

Hello all,

Please pardon me if this has been addressed before. I'm not a
frequent visitor to either of these NGs, but here's my problem and I
hope someone can help...

The good news is that I was able to recover all of the digital photos
I thought I had lost when I stupidly reformatted what had been a RAID
0 array into two seperate drives on a newly upgraded computer. This
was done by a friend who ran Easy Recovery Pro after hooking up my
drives to his own computer. To be safe, he set it to recover every
.jpg file it could find and it came back with thousands; no surprise.

Among the thousands are my few hundred digital photos taken over the
past 3 years or so. Here's the problem: After saving all of the
photos to a folder on my own new hard drive, I can check their
properties and they're all about the right size for a 1600x1200 image
--about 400kb to 470kb, more or less. However, all of the digital
photos now have dimensions of 160x120. I tried opening them in
multiple programs, including photoshop, but the resolution is the
same. It just doesn't make sense for files that size to be 1/10th the
display dimensions they ought to be, so what happened to my digital
photos in the recovery process, and is this fixable?

Possibly, but treating the original media with a program that uses
better set of heuristics for finding genuine JPEG images might be a
safer bet. Don't do anything destructive to the original disks.

It is almost certain that the recovery application has found the digicam
embedded thumbnails and set off cutting files up at the wrong
boundaries. Examining a couple of examples would prove this hypothesis.

Interestingly, this happened only to my digital photos. All other jpg
images recovered were recovered in their original size and dimensions.

Any ideas? I would greatly appreciate your help or advice.

If you put a couple of consecutive damaged JPEG images up on a website
somewhere and give the URL then it would be easy enough to check to see
if they are potentially recoverable. Useful to know camera model too.

Since the rest of your files were recovered OK we can probably rule out
hardware issues.

Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[sherif]

Thanks Martin, I'll try this soon.

 

[sherif]

Apparently not, Eric? At least not as evidenced by the numerous good
jpegs the data rec. program managed to retrieve correctly. I'm going
to try posting copies of a couple of the files online and see if any of
you guys can make sense of this problem then, because I still can't.
Thanks.

 

[sherif]

No, that at least I'm sure is not the case. I've tried opening them in
multiple applications, including explorer, photoshop, windows' native
image viewer, paint, etc. Same result every time; a file of the right
size in terms of kb according to every single application, but an image
of only 160x200, not magnifiable without accompanying loss of
resolution. As I noted in another response, I'm going to try to post
two consecutive photos to see if they're just cut up wrong or if anyone
can determine exactly what's going on with them. Thanks Ken.

 

[Eric Gisin]

If you did data recovery on FAT, any files that were fragmented will be
corrupt. Large files are more likely to be fragged.

I was incorrect about the RAID comments.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Hello all,

Please pardon me if this has been addressed before. I'm not a
frequent visitor to either of these NGs, but here's my problem and I
hope someone can help...

The good news is that I was able to recover all of the digital photos
I thought I had lost when I stupidly reformatted what had been a RAID
0 array into two seperate drives on a newly upgraded computer. This
was done by a friend who ran Easy Recovery Pro after hooking up my
drives to his own computer. To be safe, he set it to recover every
.jpg file it could find and it came back with thousands; no surprise.

Among the thousands are my few hundred digital photos taken over the
past 3 years or so. Here's the problem: After saving all of the
photos to a folder on my own new hard drive, I can check their
properties and they're all about the right size for a 1600x1200 image
--about 400kb to 470kb, more or less. However, all of the digital
photos now have dimensions of 160x120. I tried opening them in
multiple programs, including photoshop, but the resolution is the
same. It just doesn't make sense for files that size to be 1/10th the
display dimensions they ought to be, so what happened to my digital
photos in the recovery process, and is this fixable?

Interestingly, this happened only to my digital photos. All other jpg
images recovered were recovered in their original size and dimensions.

By accident, while doing some trials to recover jpegs from bad CD media I
experienced the same thing. It appears those files have some type of header
in front of the file. The file starts with "JFIF" and "Photoshop 3.0" and
some 430 bytes into the file another "JFIF" starts followed by "Adobe':

.......JFIF.....}.}.....<Photoshop3.0.8BIM.........}.......}......8BIM...........x
8BIM................8BIM..........8BIM'.................8BIM.......H./ff...lff.........
/ff...............2.....Z...........5.....-..........8BIM.......p.........................................
........................................................................8BIM...............@[email protected]
.............8BIM...............C...p......Y@..............JFIF.....H.H......Adobe.d... etc.

Strip off those 430 files and the file is still much the same length
but it displays as a thumbnail. Probably as Martin Brown explains
this photo includes a thumbnail in front of it (embedded) and without
that header only the thumbnail displays.

You will probably have to recover the photos again but this time
using a different signature that picks up on the first JFIF.

If the source is no longer available you might be able to recover the
actual size picture by stripping off the thumbnail from your recove-
red ones but that will probably be somewhat more difficult to do.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Possibly, but treating the original media with a program that uses
better set of heuristics for finding genuine JPEG images might be a
safer bet. Don't do anything destructive to the original disks.

It is almost certain that the recovery application has found the digicam
embedded thumbnails and set off cutting files up at the wrong
boundaries.

That just became meaningful after I exprienced the same to happen after
experimenting with 2 of the visually exact same pictures but of widely
different size. I used WINHEX on the bigger sized one to recover jpegs
to see if it had more than one picture or whether it had been recovered at
a fixed size (ie not truncated) and found that it was actually all one picture
but had a header in front of it. After stripping off the header that is when
the picture started to display thumbnail size.

 

[JPS]

In message <[email protected]>,

No, that at least I'm sure is not the case. I've tried opening them in
multiple applications, including explorer, photoshop, windows' native
image viewer, paint, etc. Same result every time; a file of the right
size in terms of kb according to every single application, but an image
of only 160x200, not magnifiable without accompanying loss of
resolution. As I noted in another response, I'm going to try to post
two consecutive photos to see if they're just cut up wrong or if anyone
can determine exactly what's going on with them. Thanks Ken.

It probably found the header for the full image, but only the thumbnail
image, because it fits into a single RAID0 "cluster" (usually 16KB to
64KB, IIRC).
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