Member Avatar for ATF

Hello all!

This is the place to come for help on obscure problems and I have another. Any help would be cheerfully appreciated.

This morning a program crashed my large external storage drive, which became inaccessible. I ran chkdsk which instantly found errors and fixed them. The drive was again accessible, and almost all the subdirectories seemed intact, however I soon found one, filled with thousands of collected jpeg pictures which were almost all damaged in some way. Pictures in this directory had been filed by subject into separate subfolders.

My picture indexing software could still represent all the pictures in thumbnails, but they were not available to view full size. Windows XP explorer was also able to browse them and only about 5% of them would show as working thumbnails at all.

Now my assumption in my layman's terms is that the entry in the FAT still shows the correct size entries for each .jpg, although the data was almost completely corrupted in this particular directory for some reason.

It is also clear the available space on this drive increased quite a lot after the crash and chkdsk recovery.

Am I correct in believing there is no possible way to get back any of these jpeg pictures? It's starting to look like I should just delete everything off the drive assuming it's bad and start again.


Thank you so much for your time!

  • 4 Contributors
  • 5 Replies
  • 228 Views
  • 4 Years Discussion Span
  • Latest Post Latest Post by Daniyar_1

Dani AI

Generated

Running chkdsk on an NTFS volume can leave directory entries while freeing or truncating the actual clusters those files used. The symptoms described by — thumbnails still present in an indexer, full-size JPEGs failing to open, and a sudden increase in free space — fit that pattern: metadata survived in part, but the pixel data was likely marked bad or reclaimed. chkdsk can also place orphaned fragments in FOUND folders as .CHK files.

Immediate, non-destructive approach (order matters):

  • Stop all writes to the affected drive.
  • Create a full sector‑by‑sector image of the drive to a separate physical disk and work only from that image.
  • Attempt MFT-aware recovery on the image first (restores named files when metadata is intact).
  • If that fails, run signature-based carving on the image to pull JPEGs that still have intact headers — note carving recovers contiguous files only and will lose original filenames/timestamps.
  • Search the image for FOUND.000/.CHK fragments and test renaming suspicious .chk files to .jpg.
  • Inspect a few sample files with an EXIF/hex viewer to confirm the JPEG start (SOI, 0xFFD8) and end markers (EOI, 0xFFD9); presence of a valid header improves recovery odds.

This complements ’s carving suggestion and the tool references from and : try those utilities against the image, not the original disk. Also check thumbnail caches (thumbs.db or application-specific caches) and any photo-manager databases — they sometimes contain usable preview files that can be exported.

Be realistic: if chkdsk rewrote MFT entries or freed clusters, many originals may be unrecoverable or only partially intact. For irreplaceable collections, a professional recovery lab can sometimes reconstruct fragmented files but at a cost. After recovery, reformat or replace the drive and adopt a multi-tier backup strategy to prevent recurrence.

Recommended Answers

All 5 Replies

Member Avatar for Thinka

Hi,

The extent of the damage to the photos is not clear from your post, but try the following links and hopefully one of them will restore your photos

PC Inspector from Convar - change the language to Englishif it's not already.

Download 3k

Impulse Adventure

Good luck, do post back and let us know if something works. And don't forget to back up everything that you've already got!

Member Avatar for gerbil

"Now my assumption in my layman's terms is that the entry in the FAT still shows the correct size entries for each .jpg" ... what does Explorer show - are they credible file sizes? I ask because:
"It is also clear the available space on this drive increased quite a lot after the crash and chkdsk recovery"
You mention the FAT, but is the disk FAT or NTFS format?
I don't know what sort of software, apart from a selection of malwares, or crash, would rewrite thousands of jpg files and cause other disk errors. Corrupt a few, yes, depending upon your disk caching and what files were open at the time. And thumbnails, once created, are separate entities from the file itself.. if the viewing pgm can not present some thumbnails then it is likely that the file itself is null.
Look, try this software... it bypasses the MFT and tries to find file types you specify via their headers, but won't find fragmented files.
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
Unpack it, start PhotoRec from the exe itself in the win folder - READ the instructions in each winow!!
-Select the disk, then Intel,
- in the next window go to File Opt, pressing s will toggle all or none, so uncheck all boxes and then select jpg by pressing x, then b to save. Acknowledge the OK, then Quit.
-select the partition to search in, select Search,
-Other,
-Whole,
-navigate to and select the directory to save files into [using the arrow key to highlight the .. directory will enable you to work your way up the tree; when you can highlight where you wish to save TO, press Y]; the Search and copy will commence.
Simple, huh? And do not worry, this is a non-destructive tool. And you can Quit your way out.
!!!!Make sure you have enough space to save your files to.. the tool copies out immediately what it finds - another reason for selecting ONLY jpg files in File Opt.
!!!! Ignore TestDisk - it is not the tool you want, and can be destructive if misused.
Say how you get on...

Member Avatar for ATF

Thank you both. I'm from the DOS age so my background is rooted there.

The file system is NTFS. It's pretty well most everything on the drive that was affected. That is my backup drive, and I have current versions of most of that data I can use, but only have an older backup of the .jpg pictures, that doesn't contain anything added in the past 6-8 months, so that's the data I'd like to restore.

Chkdsk was operating so fast, I couldn't follow what it was doing on the screen, but it appeared to be making hundreds of corrections. I was able to access the drive again when it finished but with inaccessible jpegs.

Yes, I understand about the thumbnails.

I'll have to just go through the list of software but it doesn't' look good. Convar Smart Recovery found 1 file in 130,000 sectors in about ten minutes now.

Thanks!

Member Avatar for gerbil

DOS age? Then you would just love PhotoRec. Best of luck.

Member Avatar for Daniyar_1

Ive had the same problem. I couldn’t open photos, which I made by my old camera in computer, because they were damaged. After this I try to recover photos with special programs, but mostly of them didnt see cameras flash driver. To recover photos I can advise you to use program hetman repair. You can find it here http://hetmanrecovery.com/
Besides this check your camera. May be reason in it.

Be a part of the DaniWeb community

We're a friendly, industry-focused community of developers, IT pros, digital marketers, and technology enthusiasts meeting, networking, learning, and sharing knowledge.