Corrupted A900 Files

[vincenzo]

Recently returned from long assignment. Whilst away my card developed errors, fortunately I found a helpful chap in far-eastern Russia of all places who recovered 99% of the fotos. Sadly some of my very best shots seem to be the damaged ones. Does anyone know of a good software for mac which repairs damaged fotos?
I can only find "recovery" programmes so far, but I need to repair the ARW file not recover it. Looking at the file, it shows 36mb and the initial preview shows my images, but then it turns pink and shows another picture. Ver strange. I think perhaps the file has got fused with previews of other files or merged with them. The file in question is on DVD and on my hard-drive. The Flash card has been formatted twice since the problems occurred.
Any tips greatly appreciated!
Vincenzo

[harvey]

Recently returned from long assignment. Whilst away my card developed errors, fortunately I found a helpful chap in far-eastern Russia of all places who recovered 99% of the fotos. Sadly some of my very best shots seem to be the damaged ones. Does anyone know of a good software for mac which repairs damaged fotos?
I can only find "recovery" programmes so far, but I need to repair the ARW file not recover it.
Any tips greatly appreciated!
Vincenzo

I'm not so sure. You have a corrupted file because the recovery did not get the proper file back and the data for those images might not be on the card in any case as it may have been overwritten.
You would need recovery software that could spot raw files and fragments of raw files on the card and that seems quite unlikely to me.

Seems you were lucky to get back what you did.

Harvey

[Dr. Harout]

Beware of non genuine cards.

[David Kilpatrick]

Your corrupted raw may have a full size JPEG preview still intact within the file. I can only suggest you search for programs which extract the embedded JPEG (I am not at my work system and can not really hunt one down) and try them.

David

[Javelin]

without the in tact cf card to try and recover from I doubt you will get the missing data you need to reconstruct the RAW files. your best bet is likely the imbedded jpg as David says. one utility that was posted here before I find pretty usefull was written by a member od a Canon forum butn works perfectly on sony cRAW & RAW files. I found it on the guys blog by searching for the file name IJFRWin.zip it adds a right click menu in windows and in addition can also make a resized jpg at the same time in nested directories.

[vincenzo]

Thanks everyone!!! Very kind. Using photo mechanic I have extracted a jpeg which is better than nothing!
I will try to recover the flash card again to see if I can dig out the RAW too, but at least its not a complete disaster!

[Javelin]

good to hear, good luck with the recovery, sometimes even formatting does't completely destroy whateverf is left on the card.



r

[vincenzo]

I've spotted something. The file I'm trying to repair is file number 5073 and file 6073 is also corrupted. I can see these 2 pictures semi-merged as fragments of both pics show under a pink overlay - weird! Foto mechanic also shows that both files are double their normal size. So this seems to be proof that these 2 files have become fused somehow. No idea to seperate them though

[harvey]

I've spotted something. The file I'm trying to repair is file number 5073 and file 6073 is also corrupted. I can see these 2 pictures semi-merged as fragments of both pics show under a pink overlay - weird! Foto mechanic also shows that both files are double their normal size. So this seems to be proof that these 2 files have become fused somehow. No idea to seperate them though

It would really help if the file format was documented, maybe others can comment on that.

It might be that you have a good second file that starts partway through the first file in which case you might see bits of the second image along with some junk depending how the data is scrambled. If this is the case then by using a binary editor you might be able to spot where the second file starts and cut that part out and try to load that as a new raw file.
But you need to be able to recognise the byte pattern for the start of the raw files for this to be practical.
And your OS needs to have tools to do it.

Harvey

[vincenzo]

Thanks Harvey. I will try to find a binary editor then and see if I can get to the bottom of this.