Author Archives: Joep

Software review: Stellar Repair for Photo

Stellar JPEG repair is now Stellar Repair for Photo I noticed Stellar renamed their photo repair tool from ‘Stellar Phoenix JPEG Repair’ to ‘Stellar Repair for Photo’. ‘Photo Repair’ suggests that rather than being limited to repairing JPEG, it also supports other digital photo formats. I visited their website and downloaded the new version. This… Read More »

repair-jpeg

Repair-JPEG.exe is the utility created by Wim Vanmaele that inspired me to add patching to my own JPEG Repair software. I can locate only one source on the internet that refers to this program. If that for some reason would seize to exist all references to it will be lost, which is why I will… Read More »

Quit smoking – Start Vaping

I smoked for years, then got into vaping and then unfortunately started smoking again. Vaping First time vaping When you want to get into vaping, the options are overwhelming. Honestly I do not know even half of it, and each day I see and read new stuff. Tanks, mods, coils. AIOs (all in ones), pods,… Read More »

JPEG repair, example of a heavily corrupted photo

In this short blog post I show an example repair of a heavily corrupted and distorted JPEG photo. End result is far from a beautiful picture, but sometimes something is better than nothing. Specially if it is one of the few photos of a loved one that is no longer with us. This is what… Read More »

NAS Data Recovery Software, UFS Explorer

With Network Attached Storage or NAS for short becoming more popular, the demand for quality DIY solutions for NAS data recovery software increases. Common steps to recover data from a NAS Steps: Disassemble the NAS and connect the disks to a PC Run either Linux or Windows + data recovery software on the PC Work… Read More »

Extract thumbnails, JPG-Repair vs Stellar Repair for Photos

Sometimes JPEG photos simply can not be repaired because the majority of the data inside a file simply is not JPEG data. I had one of those cases earlier this week. Good thing was that a reasonably sized thumbnail could be extracted. The case: a Samsung Galaxy 5 Photos were taken using a Samsung Galaxy… Read More »

The volume does not contain a recognized file system – RAW file system

The error ‘The volume does not contain a recognized file system’ CHKDSK error message, is what I’d call a ‘catch-all’ error message. It is very generic and it can have multiple causes, but in essence Windows and chkdsk have trouble determining the file system on a volume whether this is on a hard disk or… Read More »

Recovered photos are corrupt – Won’t open

Recovered photos are corrupt and won’t open after you tried to recover them using undelete, file recovery of photo recovery software? Here’s a few things to try. There are a huge number of JPEG recovery and undelete programs available on the web, many even for free. However, the vast majority of these can only handle… Read More »

Bottom half of JPEG is missing or grey or solid color

There’s basically three things that can be wrong if a JPEG opens but is partially grey:

1. File is too small. Let’s an average JPEG shot with same camera and settings is 4 MB and the ones that are damaged are like 1 MB or 2 MB. Then probably half the data is simply missing. These files can not be repaired.

2. Normal file size. Either part of the file does not contain image data or file does contain image data but is interrupted by some invalid data.

If part of the file does not contain image data then this is sometimes easy to spot using a hex editor. All of a sudden ‘random’ binary data stops and changes to FF FF FF or 00 00 00 etc.. Repair: Impossible.

In case the data is however is there but it is interrupted repair is often possible. JPG-Repair tries to detect and will try to get rid of the invalid data, however this does not always work. Current version detects invalid JPEG markers, common damage due to bad sectors and some type of corruption I observed a few times with images shot with certain Samsung phones.