Recovering JPGs

[gabrielle harrison and Paul van den Bergen]

Hi all,

I'm looking for some JPG repair tools or HDD data recovery tools.

My system is not what you'd call pristine. The HDD is a little suspect.   
This seems to be confirmed in that a bunch of my photos have started to  
not read very well.

digital photos that are around 1.3MB each.
first noticed using gThumb.

symptom is that the thumbnail first takes for ever to load, then only part  
of the image is displayed and an unexpected EoF error (or similar) occurs.

also seems to take for ever for e.g. tar to read the image files.

All the photos affected so far have been in the same directory. All the  
photos were tranfered from another disk at some point (now not available)  
all in one go so I suspect a contiguous block of HDD was used.  I suspect  
that the disk surface has some problems, though running a disk diagnostic  
tool found no obvious errors.

Presuming that I can back up the system OK I will want to recover the  
photos if I can.  I suspect that since the files were all written in one  
go and that the file size is as expected that only a small transcription  
error or missing data is the problem and that it should be theoretically  
possible to recover the rest of the file.

the question I have is - are there any tools that make this possible.

I guess I need two tools really.

1) recover as much of the file from the HDD as possible.
2) repair the JPG as best as possible.




-- 
Dr Paul van den Bergen
Chance favours the prepared mind