MAMEWorld Forums - The Loony Bin

> I just lost a bunch of pictures on my raid array!! I had a backup, EXCEPT pictures of
> my Dad's funeral! The files are there, but corrupt as hell!!
>
> Anyone know of a freeware utility to recover borked jpegs? Hex editors can read the
> files.

Recovering corrupted / overwritten files is almost always a hell of a lot of work and messing round for very little success. If ever I need to recover deleted and/or partially overwritten files, I boot from a DOS formatted thumb drive containing tools like Media Tools Pro. Leave this running in peace over night, and it gives you a list files that it can supposedly recover (but it's rarely *all* the files that are "missing"), and it's very rare that it can actually recover much without there being some corruption somewhere.

You've got the added layer of the RAID corruption / failure, so I don't rate your chances highly.

Are each of the drives still working in your array ? Or is one or more dead ? Are they all identical ? Do you have a spare ? Can you swap circuit boards between a spare and the failed drive to try and get things running again ? Were you using a RAID level with redundancy and recovery ? e.g. RAID 5 ? If so, your chances will improve significantly.

It sounds like you have recovered at least some data already. Are the file names matching your original names ? Or are they generic file names with clumps of data, perhaps from multiple files ?

Sure hope you get your files back. Maybe someone will stop by with some great tools / suggestions that will help. I hope so.

Good luck !!

Moose