photos lost on micro SD cell phone card, recovered but damaged

I used Recuva and it found a lot of the deleted images

some images look like the have the correct size but when you open them it says drawing failed or no preview available

also some images only show up 75% and the other 25% is a black bar

is there anything I can do with these images?

what would have causes this data loss to begin with?

There's is nothing you can do when files get deleted they're unprotected, therefore any additional read and write activity on the file system could corrupt the data as it would appear to be the case with your memory card.

Richard S.

why would the file size make sense but only get half a picture?

jpgs are compressed image files the decompression library needs the correct data to be able to decode the images.

If it finds bad data then it cannot decompress correctly which could lead to blocks of wrong colour or it just gives up.

Richard S.

jpgs are compressed image files the decompression library needs the correct data to be able to decode the images.

If it finds bad data then it cannot decompress correctly which could lead to blocks of wrong colour or it just gives up.

Richard S.

so basically the file is corrupt and shot?

does re-running recuva decrease recovery chances on an sd card or is that only writing, not reading?

As long as you don't write to the card then it doesn't matter how many times you re-run Recuva or any other recovery program.

I can understand your situation though, the Smug Media card in my old digital camera crashed once and I lost many precious holiday pics of friends.

There's only so much you can do with recovering files and while everyone would like to get back everything at 100% it's not always possible.

Richard S.

As long as you don't write to the card then it doesn't matter how many times you re-run Recuva or any other recovery program.

I can understand your situation though, the Smug Media card in my old digital camera crashed once and I lost many precious holiday pics of friends.

There's only so much you can do with recovering files and while everyone would like to get back everything at 100% it's not always possible.

Richard S.

the only thing that stinks is I don't want to shell out cash when it may show a thumbnail in the recovery view but it doesn't actually recover

so reading doesn't affect data recovery?

Reading from memory card would have no effect because you're not changing the contents.

Recuva can only recover what it finds no different to any other recovery program the files are damaged beyond repair.

If you want to try something else then I can recommend the following: Handy Recovery, DiskDigger (both freeware) and trialware tools by DiskInternals (Partition Recovery, Flash Recovery, Uneraser).

Richard S.

Reading from memory card would have no effect because you're not changing the contents.

Recuva can only recover what it finds no different to any other recovery program the files are damaged beyond repair.

If you want to try something else then I can recommend the following: Handy Recovery, DiskDigger (both freeware) and trialware tools by DiskInternals (Partition Recovery, Flash Recovery, Uneraser).

Richard S.

in theory if you deleted everything on your memory card and ran recuva within minutes should it find everything?

In theory files should be recoverable after deletion however in practice it's not always the case and I'll give you a little example.

I was cleaning out old mp3 files via the Command Prompt and made the mistake of deleted a song I wanted to keep.

Before I did anything I started Recuva but I couldn't recover the mp3 apparently part of the clusters had been overwritten by another file.

I found that rather strange considering the file in question already existed on the hard drive long before the other mp3 was deleted.

So I tried a handful of other recovery tools at my disposal but the same problem the file was damaged and was not recoverable.

I know for a fact the mp3 was not overwritten I'm guessing when the mp3 was deleted the information about the clusters it owned was damaged in the process.

Bottom line is recovering files is an imperfect procedure that doesn't always yeld successful results you're always at the mercy of chance.

Richard S.