Dear Experts Exchange Forum,
I am desperately looking for a solution to my problem. My pictures seem to be corrupted and my wife and I are devastated since they have a lot of value to us. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!
Background info:
I have been trying to back up all of my photos (JPGs) to an external hard drive for quite a while and during the process of copying the files, I would get a Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) error. I then took a look at the files that Windows XP was having a problem with copying. It turns out that somehow I could no longer open those files. I tried Explorer, Irfanview, Photoshop, etc., no luck. The HD seemed to make a clicking noise and hung in there. I thought that perhaps some sectors of the HD had gone bad so I ran checkdisk and Windows repaired some sectors. Windows spent several hours running checkdisk.
Problem:
Now, I can actually open the files that seemed to be bad. They actually even show correctly on the windows preview (under Details) and thumbnail View in Explorer. However, when I try to open the image, the image is not rendered correctly in any photo program. The corrupted images display the following problems or a combination of them:
1) Strips of the pictures are displaced horizontally or vertically
2) Strips of the pictures have the wrong colors
I also tried copying the image files to a different location in the HD or a different computer. Unfortunately, I obtained the same result: The image appears distorted when opening it with any photo/image tool.
Example:
For your convenience, I have included an example at the following location:
http://i70.photobucket.com/albums/i118/abillef/DSC01142.jpgYou will notice that half of the picture is good but the other half is shifted horizontally and some sections feature the wrong colors. The interesting thing is that picture shows correctly as a preview/thumbnail in Explorer.
Bottomline:
Is there any software or anything I can do to recover the JPG files? I still have some hope since the preview/thumbnails show correctly. I would be willing to buy some software to repair these image files. As I said, we have many pictures of important value to us that have gotten corrupted and we are really hoping to be able to get them back.
Thanks for your time and I look forward to your response.
Fernando
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