is there an easy way to recover photos?

Pigwidgeon

ok so my computer had a massive virus, and i just got it back, all my photos were on an external harddrive that was connected to the computer at the time, and are now all gone.

Is there anyway I can recover the photos or are they all gonners?

CabanSail

The nasty answer is to get them off the back up DVD's you made ..... but I am assuming that was not done.

You could try some data recovery software. I think that there are places you can send crashed HDD's & they will recover them, at a considerable fee.

How many photo's were on there?

Really sorry to hear about your loss, it must be terrible.

Morrisseeee

ok so my computer had a massive virus, and i just got it back

...just spent all day fixing loads of infected PC's !! so I empathise with you. But.....you say you just got it back !, ie. I presume you gave it to someone to fix it ! Did they just 'clean' your harddrive or totally re-format it ?

all my photos were on an external harddrive that was connected to the computer at the time, and are now all gone.

....did you give them your external harddrive aswell ? Did they re-format this aswell ? If they were 'deleted' then there might be hope for you, ie. deleting files is just simply removing the 'pointer'(address) to the file on a harddrive, if nothing substantial is done afterwards then the file can be 'found' again. There is 'un-delete' software out there but not easy to use !

Pigwidgeon

yeah we gave it to some one to fix, i'm not sure if they cleaned it or re-formatted it, all i know is everything including all programmes are now gone off it anyway.

no i didn't give them the external harddrive, i just plugged it in and there was nothing on it anymore so i'm not sure what happened to everything.

Morrisseeee

What do you see when you plug it in ? is there an icon for 'removable disk' ie. drive E or F or G etc. when you open windows explorer ? what happens when you plug in a USB Pen/Stick, can you see it in windows explorer ? What might be happening is that the OS (operating system>Win XP or Vista) is not using/seeing the USB 'plug-in' software (at a wild guess) !

Pigwidgeon

yeah i can see the icon for it and am able to go into it.

I tried with my card reader and can download fine off that and add new stuff to the harddrive, it just seems to have lost all the old data.

h8red

There is a program called Testdisk which comprises photorec. This will scan the drive raw and find/recover any files types you specify. Will possibly recover files even if the drive was formatted. If you do get files back they will unfortunately have crappy names. But better than nothing. It's kinda hard to use but read the instructions and give it a shot. Remember to specify a location not on the external drive to save recovered files

Valentia

The first thing to do with the drive is DO NOTHING!! Every time you write to the drive now you destroy the photos that were there.

After installing a new hard drive recently I formatted what I thought was my new drive but turned out to be the one with all my photos on it. I used Recovermyfiles and got nearly everything back. And there was a lot. That was after a full (not fast) format. I'm sure R-Studio and others would do the same thing. It takes time but it works.

eeyore2502

Our Desktop crashed and we got a guy to fix it, he did recover pictures but they all come up thumbnail size and can't be opened any bigger, is this normal?

Fionn

heya
Thats bad news about your photographs!
I've used R-Studio in the past with good results.
what he probably recovered was the actual thumbnails that were created by Windows or your viewer program

good luck

eeyore2502

thanks will try and see if I have any luck over the weekend.

stick-dan

Listen, there is a handy lightweight recovery tool that you can use for free called winhex. It is a absolutely fantastic resourcewhen it comes to recovering data and is up to industry standard in forensic detection and recovery industry,trust me i'm in a forensic course and know this. Winhex isn't overly complicated to use but does require some reading and will guarantee to recover 100% of data if the harddrive was of a ntfs type or your computer is. Winhex will even work after a quick format and you'll be fine although it will recover some softlink files and all with photos so you may have to delete some of the junk oyu dont want. It is also very handy too becuase you can choose to only retrieve jpeg files or tiff files or whatever you are after.

If you choose winhex there is a lot of support to help you on the web and i'm sure if you want help i'll answer a pm. Good luck with recovering your photographs. horrible thing to happen

Pigwidgeon

thanks for all the info everyone.
trying a recovery programme now so hopefully i'll get something back.