Photograph Recovery

I recently lost my dog & was looking for photo's of her. Unfortunately some time ago, as my drive was getting full, I moved all photo's to an external hard drive, however it seems to have become corrupt so I am unable to open anything.

I tried to recover the photo's from my 'c' drive and it got back over 46,000 pictures altogether but none was of her. There were tons that say no preview & unable to recover as files have been overwritten.

What does this mean & is there no chance of recovering my lost photo's?

Thanks for your help

Hi sheldancer, and welcome to the forum.

I'm afraid once a file has been "moved" from your C: drive the space it occupied is available to be overwritten so it isn't surprising that you're having difficulty recovering them. Your system drive is being written to constantly by Windows whilst it's being used.

It's possible you may have a better chance of a successful recovery from your corrupt external drive, depending of course on what happened to it. An explanation would be of help here.

What happens when you plug your external drive into your computer? What, if any, messages does Windows pop up, and does it still show a drive letter when plugged in?

Does it show up in Disk Management, and if you don't know how to do that we'll show you, no worries.

:)

What does this mean & is there no chance of recovering my lost photo's?

Your chances are reduced by every incorrect attempt that you may have made or are making or will make.

Your photos have existed on both C:\ and also your external drive,

therefore there are TWO different drives from which you could possibly recover your photos.

Dennis has correctly explained that when Windows is running it will naturally over-write your deleted photos that were present on C:\.

There is always hope - but you seem to have exhausted that.

If you recovered 46,000 pictures from a drive and restored them to the same drive,

it is guaranteed that you are using up the free-space in which the photos were possibly lurking, and you are causing irreversible destruction and loss.

If you recovered 46,000 pictures from drive C:\ and restored them to a different partition / drive / device then you followed what is NORMALLY good practice,

BUT in this particular case if you were restoring to the external drive which has NOW become corrupt,

then you could have been using up free-space on that drive and IF the photos were lost then they would have been in that free space and at risk of being over-written.

I strongly suggest that you make NO attempts at recovery TO that external drive,

and since you originally removed your photos from C:\ due to lack of space,

I advise you to buy / borrow an alternative external drive as the destination for ALL attempts at recovery.

Until clarified, I'm assuming sheldancer's corrupt drive has nothing to do with the unfortunate photo recovery attempts.

He/she may not be aware that corrupt drives can at times be fixed or photographs recovered from them, and if the recovery option proves to be a positive one, and the acquisition of another drive isn't possible, then any recovered photo's can be saved to the C: drive. Recovery from the C: drive looks to be a lost cause.

All supposition of course until he/she posts back.

Until clarified, I'm assuming sheldancer's corrupt drive has nothing to do with the unfortunate photo recovery attempts.

then any recovered photo's can be saved to the C: drive. Recovery from the C: drive looks to be a lost cause.

Agreed - excepting that a long time ago C:\ was getting full so the photos were moved to the external.

Since then I am sure that more files have been added to C:\ and reduced the free space,

hence he may save SOME photos into whatever free space remains on C:\,

but if he wants to attempt recovery of all that Recuva can offer he needs to drastically delete what he holds on C:\,

or acquire another drive.