Category Archives: file recovery

Recover RAW photos using JpegDigger

JpegDigger is a JPEG carver. As such you may not expect it to be useful to recover RAW photos. However I have been able to put it to good use in a number of cases where: RAW photos were lost or deleted Photos appear corrupt on memory card RAW photos were corrupt after recovery JpegDigger… Read More »

JPEG photo recovery from sd card using Piriform Recuva

Recently I was offered a batch of corrupt JPEGs for repair that were recovered from a SD card using Piriform’s Recuva. The recovered files were not recognized by any image viewer as valid JPG files. This does not appear to be an uncommon thing. Recuva is a popular and the go-to file recovery tool for… Read More »

Tips on selecting the best file recovery software

In this post I’ll give you some tips on evaluating file recovery software. To tell good from bad data recovery software. If you have just lost data and are now searching for a solution you will find that are hundreds of tools available that all claim to be the best in getting your data back.… Read More »

Photos on SD card are corrupt

When you discover photos on your SD card are corrupt or the memory card itself is corrupt you should: Do as little as possible (read: nothing) with the card. Do NOT run chkdsk on the card itself! Do not format the card even if it asks you to! Instead: Create a disk image of the… Read More »

How to fix and open recovered photos?

Unfortunately it is a common problem that you are unable to open recovered photos after using file recovery, undelete or photo recovery software on a SD card. In this post I will make some assumptions: Photos are on a memory card and therefor: File system is a variation of FAT  (FAT32, exFAT) File type is… 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 »

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.