Recovered files not accessible

[77orchids]

Hello, I would really appreciate if someone can help me figure out this issue.

I have a Canon camera, and I was using their softare package last week. One part of the software that comes with the camera is a program called ZoomBrowser EX that lets you operate the images on the camera by using the program installed on the computer. My memory card was full, so I thought using the softare would be a great way to delete the pictures, however when I hit delete, the software did not delete the pictures from my camera, rather the ones on my computer. I had at least 15,000 pictures, so you can imagine I am dying of frustration.The pictures are not in my recycle bin, so I cannot simply undelete them I have tried to use several file recovery programs which did not work, however Recuva found the files. The problem is, once I have recovered the image files onto my computer, (I used a USB flash drive installation, so as not to recover them onto the same drive as the software), I am unable to open the images. I am running Vista, and Windows Live Photo Gallery is unable to open the pictures, it says "The file may be unsupported, damaged or corrupted".

 

I was very excited to see Recuva find the files, however I am unable to open them. Can anyone help?

 

Also, I noticed that Recuva 'ignored" some files while it was scanning the drive..what does this mean? That I will not be able to recover them whatsoever, or that there were too many files found, to recover at one go?

 

I appreciate any insight about Recuva or even the Canon software, Thank you!

[Augeas]

I'll answer the easy bit. Recuva ignores whatever types of files are unticked in the options/actions box. I think the default is zero length and securely deleted files. I'm not sure about hidden sys directories. Tick all three and you will get no files ignored, but this is unlikely to help you.

 

You may get better results if you try a deep scan, but this will take some time and return a huge number of files. Well, 15,000 is a huge number to start with, anyway.

[77orchids]

I'll answer the easy bit. Recuva ignores whatever types of files are unticked in the options/actions box. I think the default is zero length and securely deleted files. I'm not sure about hidden sys directories. Tick all three and you will get no files ignored, but this is unlikely to help you.

 

You may get better results if you try a deep scan, but this will take some time and return a huge number of files. Well, 15,000 is a huge number to start with, anyway.

 

 

Thank you Augeas,

I already did a deep scan, and didnt mess with the options available, but I understand what you mean about the ignored files. I just wish I knew why they are not opening up.

[eniwetok]

I just wish I knew why they are not opening up.

 

After your files were deleted, how long was it before you used Recuva? You don't have any sort of disk maintenance program that might automatically have started to defrag the C drive, do you? I'm just wondering if the files were being written over.

 

BTW... in another thread here I warned others NOT to believe the file condition icon or think that just because you can't preview a pic, that it's not recoverable. If I were recovering photos I'd sort by size then save them all above a certain size and sort them out in Windows.

 

BTWx2 there are some programs that might repair damaged jpegs....

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=r...+damaged+jpegs+

They might work better if a photo is corrupted and not partially written over... in which case you might get back only half a pic.

 

Whatever you do just make sure you're not writing to that drive...

 

OH.... some programs... either some McAffee or Norton security suite... have some protection against deleting files. Maybe you have something like it. Not sure how it would work if something isn't deleted to the recycle bin first.