Recovered photos

[Anjistar]

Hello,

I was pointed to Irfanview after using Recuva to get back some deleted photos from an SD card. The photos were found and are of the correct size, but I can't open them in anything, even Irfanview.

Is there a trick to this, or are they lost forever?
Thank you

[j7n]

IrfanView doesn't have any ability to deal with corrupted files. It will fail to open them like most other software. Most likely the directory entries of the right size now point at random data. If you can image the disk, maybe some unfragmented ones can be recovered by software that recognizes image file headers, such as WinHex, if you let it scan the big file of the entire disk. Maybe Recuva can do it (I don't know its capabilities) but has failed.

[Kuki Dent]

The last times I used Recuva the lost files were not really recovered. The recovered file had the correct size and name, but was
filled with 0 (zero) only. Use a hex-editor or programming editor to open a recovered file and see what it contains.

[Anjistar]

The last times I used Recuva the lost files were not really recovered. The recovered file had the correct size and name, but was
filled with 0 (zero) only. Use a hex-editor or programming editor to open a recovered file and see what it contains.

Thank you for your reply.
I have never used a hex editor. How do I interpret the results? Or where could I look for help in interpreting it?

[j7n]

Open a valid photo of the same format and compare them. Compressed files that photos usually are look like a completely random set of letters. At the start there should be a header a series of quantization tables (for JPEG) and maybe some readable metadata from the camera. Some programs can use this header and find potential start of lost files.

[JendaLinda]

The files you've got from Recuva are useless, they don't contain image data. To have a better chance to succesfuly recover deleted files, the recovery must be done right after the deletion. If some other files were saved on the drive after the deletion, the previsous files were most likely overwritten with the new files. If no new files were saved on the drive, there is still possibility to recover old files using other methods, like j7n said.