I have a pen-drive where I keep my images. Today, I tried to view my images but there are no images...there are image icons but they cannot be previewed, there are just icons...and there is a BIG jpeg file (1.5 GB). I believe this is my folder turned into image file...don't know how... Please help me recover my images. I have tried "Recuva", image recovery software but unable to recover my images.
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1Can you copy the images from the pen drive to your harddrive succesfully and open them there?– LPChipJul 18, 2015 at 10:24
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Golden Rule - don't use USB sticks or SD cards to store data. Their fail-rate is abysmal.– TetsujinJul 18, 2015 at 16:30
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1 Answer
If your images were JPEG images, you could try a tool like deJPEG, which is freeware:
The program is compact, portable and extremely straightforward. Just point it at your document, click “Analyze”, and the program will scan through every byte of the source file, looking for JPEG-like structures, and saving anything it finds as separate files.
The best part of this approach is that it’s not relying on any knowledge of file formats. DeJPEG doesn’t care whether the target is a PDF file, a spreadsheet, a database or anything else; whatever you give the program, it does precisely the same thing, just searching for and extracting any embedded JPEGs. And so it stands at least a chance of working with most file types (and won’t break because there’s some minor format change, either).
Even if some, but not all of your images, were JPEG files, it may at least help you recover some of the original files.
If you have access to a Mac system running OS X, you could try File Juicer:
File Juicer doesn't care what type file you drop onto it; it searches the entire file byte by byte. If it finds a JPEG, JP2, PNG, GIF, PDF, BMP, WMF, EMF, PICT, TIFF, Flash, Zip, HTML, WAV, MP3, AVI, MOV, MPG, WMV, MP4, AU, AIFF or text file inside, it can save it to your desktop or to another folder you choose.
Do not run an image extraction tool on the 1.5 GB file stored on the pen drive; copy that file to somewhere else and then use the tool against the copy you made. It is best to preserve the original storage media in its current state in case a tool you try doesn't resolve your problem, so that you've still got the storage media in its original state, since some other tool might be able to resolve your problem. But, if you tamper with the media on which your data is currently stored, if there is some physical problem with the media, the file system is corrupted, etc., altering that media by writing to it may make it impossible to successfully use some other tool to recover your data.
For that reason, if the pen drive hasn't previously been attached to an Apple OS X system, don't plug it into one to use a tool on the OS X system. Make a copy and work with the copy, since if you plug the drive into an OS X system, it will write files to it when you connect it.
If the file system on the drive is FAT, FAT32, or NTFS, which is likely if it is connected to a Microsoft Windows system, you could from a command prompt run chkdsk against the drive, e.g., chkdsk e:, if it was drive E:. Adding the /f option, e.g., chkdsk /f e: will cause the utility to attempt to repair any file system problems it finds, which, of course, will alter the media, but if the problem is caused by file system corruption, it might recover files for you.
answered Jul 18, 2015 at 13:40
