Corrupt Memory Stick JPG Retrieval

T

Thr0tt

Active member
Hi,

Hoping someone has been successful and used some software to retrieve files from a USB stick that has become corrupt if so here is my challenge :

Wife's sister has asked me to look at her USB stick which had a load of photo's on which ok initially it cant be viewed but using some free tools I have managed to retrieve 90% of the data needed however most of the JPG's have thumbnails where you can view the image but when you try and open the actual file it has corruption so you only see the first couple of lines of the image.

Best case is some automagical software to fix this corruption, next best and what I have been trying to do but failing is retrieving the thumbnails and convert them to lower quality images (something better than nothing right), worse case she is stuffed...

Any experiences and successes you can share ?
 
You can't just recover data that doesn't exist any longer (i.e. corruption typically means the data is no longer in a form which is usable, therefore gone). It's even worse in files like JPG's which are compressed (and you run into the same issues with compressed archives like ZIP's.. i.e. any piece of the archive is corrupt, the entire thing is corrupt).

Salvage what you can, and move on.
 
Yeah thought that might be the case, I can retrieve some docs she had on there and other files but the main loss will be her pictures which (her own fault) she hasnt appeared to backup like most of us do now on cloud offerings...

Will continue for a little while longer with some apps I have pulled down and give up after that.
 
Thr0tt said:
Yeah thought that might be the case, I can retrieve some docs she had on there and other files but the main loss will be her pictures which (her own fault) she hasnt appeared to backup like most of us do now on cloud offerings...

Will continue for a little while longer with some apps I have pulled down and give up after that.
Click to expand...

You may have already tried this, or one of the apps you have will do it, but rebuild the boot record, as it may be what is corrupt and not pointing to the correct files, hence why you can't access them or comes up as corrupt.

Treat the usb drive like a hard drive, use recovery tools on it just as you would a normal drive. It's been years since I had to deal with anything like this, so I can't really give you any good examples of what software to use to do it now days, however, maybe this writeup from techradar will give you some good suggestions:

https://www.techradar.com/news/the-best-free-file-recovery-software
 
Pretty much where is started and tried all of them. Cheers. Got one last stab then I’m done and will break the news and offer a learning lesson on backups...
 
Thanks for that, I have got the files but they are corrupt so original JPG's are stuffed as far as I can tell however...

After stating that several still have thumbnails and focusing on that I have used EXIF to extract the thumbs and write them to a JPG file, sure the quality is poor but hey better than nothing right ?

exiftool -a -b -W %d%f_%t%-c.%s -preview:all <directory>

For directory I just used * which looked at all the files and created thumb jpg's where it could find them.
 
Thr0tt said:
Thanks for that, I have got the files but they are corrupt so original JPG's are stuffed as far as I can tell however...

After stating that several still have thumbnails and focusing on that I have used EXIF to extract the thumbs and write them to a JPG file, sure the quality is poor but hey better than nothing right ?

exiftool -a -b -W %d%f_%t%-c.%s -preview:all <directory>

For directory I just used * which looked at all the files and created thumb jpg's where it could find them.
Click to expand...

Read this thread, as it is someone who had a drive crash in raid 0, and has lost photos. They mention This:
JPEGsnoop is great for analysing or even fixing corrupt photos
Click to expand...
https://newsgroup.xnview.com/viewtopic.php?t=15802

I also suggest after you have exhausted all thumbnail conversions to jpg's, you disable thumbnail cache, delete the thumbnail file(s) in each folder and try to view the files again, as windows uses the thumbnails to speed up reading the files in a folder. Because of this, with all the fun bugs that come along with windows, in the off chance that there is a bug with the thumbnail cache or corrupt thumbnail file, causing the corruption problems, because unless the file is deleted, you should have all the thumbnails for all the pictures as they are created when the file is saved to the folder. All thumbnails are saved in the same file in each directory. Makes me wonder if there is a cache problem linking to the wrong files or the thumbnail file is corrupt, which is causing windows to think the original file is gone, when it is not. It's not supposed to work that way, but who knows.

Some info here that may help, with this sentence standing out (using various methods is a hotlink in the article, giving instructions):
It is furthermore possible to link thumbnails with their original files using various methods.
Click to expand...

https://www.ghacks.net/2014/03/12/thumbnail-cache-files-windows/


it may be pointless, but worth a try I guess.. up to you.
 
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Thanks, the thumbs are not cached on my machine as its not my stick and when recovering the files I am not pulling the .db so cannot reset or remove this.

Tried the hex editor but as I don't have any of the original copies to compare to then its a bit of a failed attempt. All good info for others that may stumble on this thread though. I think ive spent enough time, maybe would spend more if they were my piccies...).
 
Tried the demo, gives me the same as what I am able to retrieve from the other tools, thanks though.

I don’t know enough about reconstructing via hex editor and if it’s possible as I don’t have original files to compare. Most of the pictures have a little bit of the picture but the rest is blank, thumbnails for many I have saved as per above which I still think is all I am able to do. Tried a couple of apps to “recover” or save corrupt jpg but they don’t...
 
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