Just one thing, I have successfully recovered various jpg files to my pc. When I look at them in explorer (ie thumbnail view) it shows the whole picture, however when I select the thumbnail and open it, only the top 1/5th of the image is sucessfully displayed (the rest is blank).
Any suggestions or is it not piossible to recover this file?
So the thumbnail shows but the file doesn't? My guess would be that the files wasn't completly recovered. Sometimes i will download something from online and my computer might lose internet connection well it shows the thumbnail but when you open the files like you said only about 1/5th of it appears. The rest of the file is like grey or white or even discolored. I think this might be the answer to the question. If you install a recovery program after you have deleted something, a program such as Norton may erase that file when you install it. Also i have come to find that windows does as it wishes as i am sure that many people have come to find.
One last thing if a file is deleted time is the key the more you do on your computer and the longer you take to recover the file the larger the margin that the file is unrecoverable.
As has already been said, it looks like you haven't successfully recovered all of your original image file. Most JPG images contain an embedded thumbnail as well as the actual picture data, so it looks like you have been able to retrieve this part only - or the remainder is wholly or partially corrupted.
If your original file was readable before deletion then my guess is that the disk sectors containing the now unreadable parts of the file were overwritten before Recuva could make a stab at retrieving them. If not, the previous respondant's reply contains the answer. To get the best chance of retrieving accidentally deleted data it is vital to do nothing with the disk containing it until a program like Recuva has been used for retrieval to another disk.
You may still be able to salvage more of your restored files if they are corrupted by missing or incorrect byte stream terminations. There are several freeware and shareware programs out there that claim to "mend broken files", which they do by re-writing the missing terminations.