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April 3, 2011

Hawaii Day 10 - Data Recovery in Waikiki

Jennifer and I ran over to Waimanalo this morning to see Brian again. Jen and I boogeyboarded for a while and then Brian took some photos of us with his ginormous 8" x 10" large format Deardorff camera. It's really a piece of work. I've never actually seen one used before.

In any event, now we're back in Waikiki resting and I'm trying to recover some of the lost files (using Jennifer's PC. Mine is toast.)

First, I'm attempting to recover files from my CF memory cards. I started with a 1 Gig Compact Flash (CF) card that I don't think I even used on this trip just as a test case. I'm using this software called Recuva.

First, I verified that there were no files on the 1 gig CF card. Then, I ran Recuva in the fast mode (not using Deep Scan) and It found 203 files right away...in less than a second. Then, I reran it in the deep scan mode, and it found one more file, so I have a total of 204 files so far. I'll attempt to recover them. Note that these files appear to be from Jennifer's stop-frame animation projects, not Hawaii photos at all.

I told it to recover the files, and it recovered 204 files in 238.9 seconds. Which isn't too shabby, to my way of thinking. I verified that the files were recovered to the new directory I created on Jen's C drive. Fair enough.

So I decided to try this same process with one of my 8 gig CF cards I used on the trip. First, I verified that there were no valid photos in the DCIM folder on the 8 gig CF card.

When I told it to scan the card, the Recuva software immediately found 2,078 picture files. So I told it to go ahead and do the "Deep Scan" of the 8 gig memory card to see if it could turn up anything else. In the end, it found a total of 3,137 picture files (an additional 1,059 photos) in 1551.38 seconds (approx 25 minutes) on the 8 gig CF card.

Then, I told it to recover the files to a new folder I created on Jen's C drive. The software initially estimated the recovery time at 40 minutes.

Unfortunately, most of the files that are being "recovered", appear to be damaged or corrupted. Windows Photo Viewer (in Windows7) says "Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because the file appears to be damaged, corrupted, or is too large."

Hmmm. It seems like now the files that are being restored appear to be good (uncorrupted) photos. Woohoo! So, I'm able to recover some of my photos anyway. :)

OK. The program said that it recovered 3,137 .jpg files in 2,765.40 seconds (approx 46 minutes). Of these files, approximately 1,064 of the images appear to viewable and uncorrupted.

Now, I'm deep scanning my 2nd 8 gig CF card. Right away, it said it found 2,044 files. Now, it's deep scanning the CF card. Says it has 50 minutes left. I'm going out for dinner in Waikiki.

OK. Back from dinner. Jennifer's laptop hibernated because she doesn't have the power options set correctly. I fixed them. It's continuing now. Says 5 minutes left.

It completed. Says it found 2,913 files in 5,552.61 seconds (approx 92 minutes, but we were gone to dinner and the laptop hibernated while we were gone). So, it looks like it found an additional 869 picture files in the "deep scan" mode.

I told it to recover these 2,913 files and it's off to the races. Estimated time to recover is 40-50 minutes. But, oddly, it looks like the same thing is happening with this CF card. The files that are found immediately are copied over, but corrupted. The picture files that are found in the "deep scan" mode, on the other hand, are recovered successfully.

I emailed one of the corrupted files to my home computer, opened an RDP tunnel to it, and attempted to open the image in Adobe Photoshop CS5, but got this message:
"Could not complete your request because an unknown or invalid JPEG marker type is found."

I then opened the file in a Hex Editor, and it appears to be valid data. It's not just all binary zeros or anything. So, it's possible that a fix exists for this.

I tried opening the same file in IRFanView and it says "Can't read file header ! Unknown file format or file not found !" This is interesting, however. This is the first indication I've seen that the file header is problematic.

Cam2PC says "Error decoding image file _MG_0992.jpg"

I might try using this PhotoRescue software. OK. I downloaded the Trial Version of PhotoRescue 3.1. I figure that a) I have nothing to lose and b) it might be able to repair some of my corrupted .jpg files.

At the end of the 2nd 8gig CF card recovery, the software said it had recovered 2,913 files in 3,212.51 seconds (approximately 53 minutes). Of these, approximately 1,182 pictures files are viewable.

OK. Attempted to scan the 16 gig memory card on Jen's laptop with Recuva.com, using Deep Scan. Said it found 10367 files (34308 ignored) in 4,477.6 seconds (approx 74 minutes). Only then did I realize I'd scanned the c: drive instead of the j: drive. Doh!

Rescanning using my home PC. Also copying 24.2 Gigs (6,262 image files) of my recovered files off of Jen's laptop and onto the 4 Terabyte WD ShareSpace RAID Level 5 array. OK. Looks like it copied the files over to my WD ShareSpace.

recovered_photos_1_Gig = 204 files
recovered_photos_8_gig = 3,137 files
recovered_photos_8_gig_Card_2 = 2,914 files

Now, my desktop has completed the first pass at recovering the 16 Gig CF card. Says it found 4,227 files in 5,069 seconds (approx 84 minutes).

So, I switched to advanced mode, selected to restore all files, and it's restoring now to the w:\recovered_photos_16_gig folder.

I can't connect remotely to my desktop for whatever reason, now that I'm at the DEN airport. I just get a black screen. But if I connect to my home network through a different computer, it looks like I recovered approximately 2,100 viewable images from the 16 gig memory card. Not all of these photos are from Hawaii, however.

It looks like approximately 1,114 viewable photos from the 16 gig memory card were photos from Hawaii.

.

Posted by Rob Kiser on April 3, 2011 at 7:40 PM

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