Damage/Corrupted Photo's

Hello there,
My name is Anthony and I have a question for you that you may not even be able to help me with or direct me but I can't think of anywhere else to go. After this I may try another photography forum or I thought about jpeg.org.

A few years ago I recovered some data from a RAID array in which I was able to almost all of the data successfully except for some of the pictures. 20% of the pictures that were recovered will open fine but about 80% of those won't open and say 'no preview available'. The file size looks legit/ok (it says 4MBs and not 0 or 1 MBs). All other data from the drive is fine. It seems like only photo's were effected for some reason.

Over the years I have tried:
-At least 8 different programs (in an attempt to re-save them in hopes to repair them) but nothing has worked. Some of those program are Photoshop, Infranview, Corel, Picasa, Paintshop, GIMP, and others.
-Called a data recovery company to see if they can help but they can't repair the file but only recover the file from the drive.
- I looked into the HEX header of the photo and saw that it was different than another 'known good' photo taken from the same camera. So I replaced the header in the non-working photo which did not work. I did this because I heard all JPG's should have the same header information.
- I then tried looking at the metadata of the photo which looks ok and intact.

Here we are maybe 4 years later and I decided to not give up and see if anyone else out there can help. Does anyone have any suggestions on who I can go to? A company? A user? If you guys can't help, I'll give jpeg.org a try out of desperation.

Thank you for your time,

Anthony

major briggs said:

Hello there,
My name is Anthony and I have a question for you that you may not even be able to help me with or direct me but I can't think of anywhere else to go. After this I may try another photography forum or I thought about jpeg.org.

A few years ago I recovered some data from a RAID array in which I was able to almost all of the data successfully except for some of the pictures. 20% of the pictures that were recovered will open fine but about 80% of those won't open and say 'no preview available'. The file size looks legit/ok (it says 4MBs and not 0 or 1 MBs). All other data from the drive is fine. It seems like only photo's were effected for some reason.

Over the years I have tried:
-At least 8 different programs (in an attempt to re-save them in hopes to repair them) but nothing has worked. Some of those program are Photoshop, Infranview, Corel, Picasa, Paintshop, GIMP, and others.
-Called a data recovery company to see if they can help but they can't repair the file but only recover the file from the drive.
- I looked into the HEX header of the photo and saw that it was different than another 'known good' photo taken from the same camera. So I replaced the header in the non-working photo which did not work. I did this because I heard all JPG's should have the same header information.
- I then tried looking at the metadata of the photo which looks ok and intact.

Here we are maybe 4 years later and I decided to not give up and see if anyone else out there can help. Does anyone have any suggestions on who I can go to? A company? A user? If you guys can't help, I'll give jpeg.org a try out of desperation.

Thank you for your time,

Anthony

Click to expand...

I had a similar problem while trying to recover files lost by a corrupted CF. Nothing could open them except for a program called PhotoRec . It's a free open source utility that "ignores the file system and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media's file system has been severely damaged or reformatted." It worked like a charm.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Give it a try and let us know if it worked for you.

Great! Thank you, Andre. I will give this a try right when I get home from work. Thank you for your response and I will let you know how it goes.

-Anthony

EDIT: I may have already tried this program as I remember looking for anything and everything that could possibly help. But, I'll try (again) to make sure.

That didn't work I'm sorry to say.

What I did was, I quick formatted a USB thumb drive and put the corrupted pic's on it. I then scanned it using qphotorec_win.exe (which looks to be the GUI version) and let it scan. It dumped a bunch of files into the folder I choose but the pic's in the folder were not the pic's I have on the drive (which seems odd).

So I did a full format of the USB drive, copied the damaged pic's over, deleted them and tried again. It found no files at all.

I then copied the files onto the USB drive again, scanned it and it still found no files at all.

I'm wondering if it's not detecting the files as JPG's (or as a file at all) due to the HEX signature being corrupted (if it even is). The wiki says that's how it identifies JPG's if I'm understanding it correctly.

Any other suggestions?

Most likely, the unexpected pics that showed up were on the USB drive prior to the quick format.

A quick format only erases the directory entries. The files themselves are still intact.
Of course, you can no longer get to them (using ordinary means) because the USB drive no longer knows where each file starts in physical memory - the start addresses having been lost when the directory was cleared in the quick format process. (That's the layman's explanation for a HDD; it's a little more complicated with USB drives for reasons we don't have to get into here.)

I think a quick format writes either all 00H's or all FFH's to the directory.
If this were a Jeopardy "Final", I'd go with FFH.

As for your specific problem with these JPEG's, it sure sounds like you've got a corrupted header, and probably missing a few end markers as well. If so, you are probably out of luck.

If you still have the original hardware (camera?) that created these files, I wonder if you can try to open them there, and if successful, rename them. That should at least correct the JPEG header.

Also (and this has been a LONG time, so don't quote me!), I recall there is a difference in JPG vs JPEG in the actual header. If you're trying to cut-and-paste a known good header into your corrupted images using a HEX editor, you might want to inspect/verify any difference between the two. The good news (I think?) is that if you can get the header right, you should at least see the thumbnail(s), even if the full-size image data is totally bonkers.

And not to insult your intelligence, but your best chance of success (perhaps only chance?) is using a donor header that was created on the same hardware as your corrupted files.

Good luck with this. (As I'm sure you know, this is not particularly fun.)
I've only ever got this right once, and was with a JPG that just had the wrong color starting about 2/3rd down the image, but the image was otherwise OK. Almost like the bottom third was a color negative.

You might try this tool:

http://www.impulseadventure.com/photo/jpeg-snoop.html#

I think it would be a good advice to compare the fields of decodeable files (from the same camera/settings) to the non-decodable. Perhaps some data can be recovered by substituting headers (e.g. custom huffman tables).

JPEG files contain special synchronization markers in order to be able to recover from errors (or to segment the file for e.g. multithreaded decoding). Depending on the error that has occured, it might be possible to search for those markers and extract one or more segments. Actually decoding those segments into (N*8) x (M*8), N,M={1,2,...} pixel blocks might be trivial or really hard, depending on if the header contains unusual instructions on how to interpret the data (e.g. Huffman tables) and if the header can be decoded, guessed or copied from another image.

Once such a block can be decoded (I believe that it was called "MCU" in the standard), it has very few dependencies on other blocks. Only a DC prediction is done with the previous block is carried out, this is probably terminated on each line boundary.

If the images are really important to you, there must be professional services that specialize on this kind of thing. It might be expensive though.

-h

Thank you both!

Anduril:

Yes I've fairly familiar with how formatting works as I was a computer tech for Honda for 11+ years. But, I don't know it in detail as you do. I guess I tried it those three ways to cover any questions you guys may have. The program I used seemed to be for data recovery and not really to repair a photo. So I wanted to 1. Mimic recovering a photo that was deleted from a USB drive. 2. Recover a photo that was quick formatted. 3. Recover a photo that was fully formatted.

I have many photo's that are fine that were taking with the original camera. And I feel like in the past I tried to replace the header and the footer of the damaged file with that of a known good file and I didn't have any luck. I can't remember exactly what I replaced so maybe I'll try again.

So, I assume you mean copy them onto the camera's flash drive and try to open them? Good idea. I'll give that a shot.

I believe I used the header and footer from the same file extension of the damaged file. Yes, you're probably right that they have different headers and footers. The thing I think may be the key is replacing all HEX data that is common among all JPG files. I don't know what were the JPG HEX data stops > where the actual picture HEX beings > and where the rest of the JPG HEX data ends. Man, that sounds like a daunting process.

Again, Anduril, thank you for your time!

Hjulenissen, thank you as well.

I remember this site and thought it was the key to my issues. I wrote this guy offering him my kitchen sink to help me and I didn't hear back. I even looked up his email in the DNS registery of his domain name (lol maybe that spooked him) Maybe I will try again though. I believe I tried this tool and had no luck but I will revisit it again.

If you don't mind, can you explain what you are talking about in your reply? Of course, if you don't have the or you think it's a lost cause, I understand completely.

Yes, I feel there is a company out there somewhere that could help but I have no clue who to contact. I have searched the web for such a company but it's really hard to find. All key works I used for this type of situation brings up companies that recover data or something similar. I was hoping someone here knew of a company that could help. Price MAY not be a factor depending on how much.

Thank you, Hjulenissen!

If anyone else out there can recommend me a company to consult, I would very much appreciate it.

Have a good day all!

Also, I used the program at that impulse adventure site and I got a particular error. The next step for that error is to zip it up and if the file size changes substantially (like to a 0 or 1KB) then the pictures are probably gone. When I zipped min up, the file size barley changed at all. Which I think means the data is still there. Granted, the data could be there but corrupted but I just can't believe that. I'm willing to, but I don't think that is the case.

major briggs said:

Yes, I feel there is a company out there somewhere that could help but I have no clue who to contact. I have searched the web for such a company but it's really hard to find. All key works I used for this type of situation brings up companies that recover data or something similar. I was hoping someone here knew of a company that could help. Price MAY not be a factor depending on how much.

Click to expand...

Where I live, I would contact a company called www.ibas.no. I see that they have international partners, in the US they link to https://www.krollontrack.com. They probably want to have data as close to the source as possible (i.e. access to a crashed disk instead of salvaged files from that disk).

Be prepared to pay...

major briggs said:

Thank you, Hjulenissen!

If anyone else out there can recommend me a company to consult, I would very much appreciate it.

Have a good day all!

Click to expand...

Perhaps you could post (at least) two non-corrupt images and one corrupt image here? I imagine that the more similar the images (resolution, camera setting etc), the better.

-h

Sounds good. I'll make a note of that company and contact them.

Sure, I can do that. When I get home I will upload them.

Thank you, Hjulenissen.

Ok, here is a link to my public Dropbox folder. Let me know if you can't get to the pictures.

So the guy from Impulse Adventures contacted me! He took a look at a few of the files and said he does not feel it's possible to repair the pictures. So I guess I will finally give up.

Thank you everyone for your time.

Hi, now day’s data recovery becomes very easy with advanced recovery tools. You just need to download your favorite data recovery tool to recover your data. I have used Stellar Phoenix and Rucava previously and both provided good result.