Hello all, I have recently recovered an image that i had deleted on a diskette (with Badcopy Pro), but when I try to open it it doesn't work (invalid jpg file, unable to draw preview,...). Now I'm guessing it's been partially overwritten already, though not so much because the file is still rather large (about as large as it was when i deleted it). I have tried several programs to attempt and repair the corrupted jpg but none have succeeded. Is there any way to read the jpg anyway with it being incomplete? Thanks

.jpg is a graphics format used in internet postings. Once corrupted it cannot be "fixed" because of the nature of the file itself. If it won't open in the program that created it (eg. Photoshop) there's not much you can do, unfortunately.

Drakan - you don't say what you're attempting to open the damaged file with - but when one application fails, try another - some are better than others at dealing with damaged files, I've certainly been able to open files in one application that couldn't be opened in the 'program that created' them. Paint (the one that comes w/Windoze) is pretty good about fixing pix, so is PaintShop Pro (PhotoShop tends to be picky about loading damaged files). Two others that are good w/corrupted files are ImageVu and CompuPic Pro, the latter being capable of differentiating between formats that even have an incorrect filename extension, i.e., named as a .gif, but is actually a .jpg or .png or whatever...

The man is right. I have over 7000 jpg format pics on my system. If a part of one get damaged I can not get to it. It is gone. It's just the way the files are constructed. My advice is to back up ALL of your pics to a cd before you lose another one.

I've got a similar problem... My digial camera's batteries died in the middle of a pic and i got a partial file saved - file size is 26k (normal pic is 300+k). When the viewer (on the camera) tries to bring up the pic, it flashes a picture for 1/2 sec, then blanks out and displays "File corrupted, yada yada". Because it displays something for a split sec., there's got to be *something* there. I'm searching for a tool that can repair the file, or at least show me however much I do have. PaintShop Pro v8 or Paint couldn't open it. :( Ideas anybody?

JPEG JPG files use Discrete Cosine Transform as part of the compression algorithm which means that to reconstruct the image you need ALL parts of the file to perform iDCT successfully, unlike BMP files where you can get part of the image back. Also JPEG uses an encoding technique that reorders all the data before saving, this is like cutting up the picture and shaking it in a bag before saving it. So a partially damaged file = no file. JPEGs are unrecoverable on the whole because a recovery program has no idea of where all the pieces go, and which ones are missing or damaged! If you can see part of the damaged image in any application then it's probably an embedded thumbnail which is part of the JPG header (i think) and NOT from the actual image data :( Sometimes i find damaged files with the bottom part corrupted, but these can be opened in the first place. I suspect these files were not created properly to begin with. In Windows Explorer switch to Thumbnails view (View->Thumbnails), sometimes Explorer reads the embedded JPG thumbnail even if Paint Shop Pro cannot open the file. But as people have said above, if you can't open it with PSP or Paint then it's lost because of how JPEG works.