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General discussion

Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars on them, help!

Apr 30, 2010 6:41AM PDT
Question:

Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars on them, help!


Some of my digital pictures that have been stored on an external hard drive since 2002-2003 have gray bars on them. The gray bars differ in size, from 1/3 to 1/2 coverage of the picture, usually from bottom to top. There are also some digital pictures that have ?split?, whereas the top part of the picture is not in line with the bottom half. Again, these digital pictures have been stored on a external hard drive for 7-8 years. I first noticed this problem about two years ago. The current external drive is about one year old. All of the problem pictures were shot from a Minolta 4mp digital camera purchased in May 2002. Sorry I do not know the model number. I thank CNET for considering my issue for feedback of possibly resolving the problem. Thank you.

--Submitted by Ted V.

Here are some featured member answers to get you started, but
please read all the advice and suggestions that our
members have contributed to this question.

Not enough information given... --Submitted by Watzman
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296319#3296319

More information would be helpful --Submitted by timhood
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296417#3296417

Incomplete photos --Submitted by GEO2003
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296388#3296388

Suggestions to check --Submitted by marketrue
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296334#3296334

Silent Corruption?" --Submitted by Flatworm
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296643#3296643

Gray Bars and split --Submitted by HeadHancho
http://forums.cnet.com/5208-7809_102-0.html?messageID=3296578#3296578

Thank you to all who contributed!

If you have any additional recommendations or suggestions to help Ted solve this mystery, please click on the reply link and submit away. Please be as detailed as possible when providing your solution. Thanks!

Discussion is locked

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Gray bars and offset pics
May 7, 2010 1:11PM PDT

I've seen this same effect......I think it may have to do with any of several issues, but I've mainly narrowed mine down to the camera's handling of .jpg's, or the transfer method to the computer. When I plug my camera into the front of the computer itself (a USB 2.0 port) it will work fine. If I use one of the ports to go to a multiport USB extended (especially those that derive power from the computer), I can see corruption as I upload the pics from the camera to the computer.

So, I chalk it up to one or both of 2 things:

1. A difference in the .jpg software in my Panasonic FX12, as it compresses and the Windows viewer that uncompresses it. I have not tried specific pics in different viewers, as frankly, that thought never occurred to me. I just assumed they were corrupt and lost. Most were not critical, so I just deleted them.

2. The USB hub I used was defective or has issues getting all data transferred (there is probably little if any error recovery when uploading) to my computer. Once the picture is on the system(and has been viewed and verified intact), I've not had them go bad on me.

I would suggest you pull the card and use a card reader as someone earlier did when you upload (if possible) or be sure to connect to at least a USB 2.0 port directly (no hubs involved) into the system you are uploading to. I would upload (temporarily) to your internal harddrive. Then, I would load & view ALL of them to be sure they are good in your viewer. After that I would move them to your external drive (via copy), and verify again. If all goes well then, I would back up to a CD/DVD and verify once more.

That is overkill if they are not very important photos (not all I take are even worth keeping! LOL), but you could surely narrow down the possibilities.

I would also verify they are good in the camera before any of this. I did find 2 pics that were corrupted in the camera itself, so that's why I believe the compression/decompression is buggy in the camera. But that's just my take on it.

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Might be memory problems
May 7, 2010 1:13PM PDT

I also had those problems at random and it wasn't a corrupt file. Some of those pics at times have unusually large megs sucking up a ton of windows memory. Unable to load enough memory to display the picture, gray bars, half pictures, split images, you name it and it seemed to be able to come up.
How long have you left your computer on without turning it off? Windows doesn't know how to turn lose of "resources" once it uses them. Running low on resources from a long time computer run time? Reboot the computer and first thing is to look at pics. Still not good? Use another computer. Don't have a second computer. Borrow one from a friend. And use a different photo shop program. Sometimes it is the program you are using not the files themselves.
Still bad pics. Get ready to turn lose of some serious change. I'm not sure who is making programs to repair missing data in files and they don't always work. You can reload them back into a high end photo editor and clean them up but you better be a darn good digital editor yourself. Or send them in for repair. Check first and ask for references. Lots of repair shops claim to be good when they only thing they are good at is charging for destroying what you sent them.

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Grey lines on photos
May 7, 2010 1:25PM PDT

Sounds to me like it's a compression issue. Many, in order to try to save hard drive space used some form of compression on their bitmapped images. Several years ago the term 'gigabyte' wasn't a typical term for many, let known 'terabyte'! While file formats haven't changed much, methods have ti some degree. While not know your file type, compression or not, that's about as close as I can get. Lastly, if these are large images that you're trying to drag their size down too small, you'll cause adjacent pixels to randomly combine (or separate) causing those undesireable lines.

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Hard disc failure...
May 7, 2010 1:50PM PDT

First try a different program to view them. If the gray bars appear the same through each viewer then it may be a corrupt hard drive. In that case, the power may have been cut too soon or the drive at some point was not shutdown or 'ejected' correctly.

If you suspect hard drive corruption, you need to scan each hard drive containing your damaged photo files. If you have moved files around, then the drive that the errors originally started to occur on is most likely the drive that you need to focus on, but it is recommended to scan all drives with important data.

To scan the drives, click 'Start' then 'My Computer' (or 'Computer' on Vista/Win7)

Starting with the first hard drive:
1) 'Right' click the drive icon and select 'Properties'.

2) Click the 'Tools' tab at the top and then under 'Error-Checking' click the 'Check Now' button. If you are presented with a window saying 'Windows needs your permission to continue' then click the 'Continue' button.

3) Under 'Check Disk options' make sure BOTH check boxes are SELECTED, then click 'Start'. If you are presented with a window that says 'Windows can't check the disk while it's in use' then click the 'Schedule disk check' button.

4) Repeat steps 1 through 3 for each hard drive.

5) If you were presented with the 'Windows can't check the disk while it's in use' window in step 3, then restart your computer and DO NOT press any key when it asks you if you want to skip the test. It will run the full disk check and fix any errors.

After all that process, if you still have problems then you should consult a data recovery professional. It is most likely a failure of some kind on whatever drive the problem originally started to occur on. There is software that can help, but it takes a bit more computer knowledge for proper recovery of your damaged files.

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Pictures with Gray bars and floppy disks.
May 7, 2010 2:28PM PDT

Without getting too technical on you, the gray bars that you are getting are due to the loss of magnetnetism on the hard disk platters. This same phenomenom is the same reason that floppies were discontinued and a better more reliable way was found (IE: CD, DVD Optical disks). What happens is after a while on any magnetic device is that the magnetic material looses its "memory" and the data is either corrupted (what you are seeing)or the file system (where the Hard drive stores the information of where the files are located and it's size) gets confused and you will see errors. Your Hard drive was stored for quite a few years without even being attached to the computer so that is what happens when no "refresh of data" is done once in a while.
Any time you do a defrag, copy, move, and a few other file operations the hard drive refreshes the data so it remains strong and avoids the data loss scenario as you have experienced. Basically, you should have attached the HDD, done a defrag, then unplugged it for lets say the following year and just do it once every year and it would have been fine. You can still do it now, but whatever damage is done will remain as it is but you won't lose anymore data!
Good Luck!

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Bad news ...
May 7, 2010 3:48PM PDT

Luckily I haven't had these problems with any of my own photos, but I have downloaded many pictures that looked that way in the end.

Two separate problems:

The grey area at the bottom of an image is what you see when the tail end of the file is missing or unreadable.

The split image could be one of two things - sometimes it is just a - small - corruption in the middle of the picture, at other times a piece is missing from the middle of the picture.

For completeness' sake: If the front end is missing then no software can identify the file as an image - all the information explaining the image structure is at the beginning of the file - no header info, no picture.

So, with very little information to go by, it looks as if the data on your disk is mostly corrupted and in such cases there is little hope of rescuing these pictures. This is where you will hear questions like "don't you have a second copy of everything?"

I think that is why I never delete anything from the camera's memory chip before I have stored it on two independent media. Let me hope for you that you do have a second copy of your images, or at least, that I am wrong and recovery is still possible.

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Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars
May 7, 2010 4:01PM PDT

Your problem happen to catch my eye. I have had the same problem with digital photos on more than one occasion and for different reasons. One time it was a problem with the camera itself and another was a data transfer issue.

I was actually storing photos on solid state drive and all other file types were still in tact making a drive error the last thought in my mind. I quickly discovered that I was losing bits of information (ones and zeroes) during transfer due to a bad connection. I've never heard of a hard drive losing part of a file unless an error occurred during some operation that caused the error. when I was saving the jpg files from my camera to my drive I did not get an error but could not retrieve the files later because the drive never received all of the file and could only return to me the information it received.

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Replaced/Upgraded RAM Lately?
May 7, 2010 4:08PM PDT

I have experienced this very anomaly just after replacing/upgrading RAM and then viewing the photos. When the images are opened into a viewing program, the photo is stored in RAM temporarily, then are put back to the hard drive after you close the window. RAM can corrupt the photos to leave gray bars on them if it is bad RAM. Even if the RAM modules are brand new as I have purchased BAD NEW RAM upgrades several times! Usually there is one large gray bar either at the top or bottom of the photo horizontal (i've never seen vertical bar corruption on images, only horizontal) and several gray bars above the large one that will end with one row of pixels where the image colors start to come back into view.

Don't know if it even applies to your issue but it's worth a check.

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Digital photo stoed on external drive
May 7, 2010 9:53PM PDT

hi brother,
I think your external drive fall down or hardly hit any place runing time.so your foto files data going to corrupt.
thanks

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Almost Certain Problem is not Hard Drive
May 7, 2010 11:14PM PDT

The issue you have mentioned is one that I have experienced many times. The good news is your pictures are almost certainly not corrupt and it is VERY unlikely that there is anything wrong with your hard drive.

The issue is most likely the application(s) you are using to display the pictures and the way they render the picture to your screen.

There are several ways to verify that your pictures are still completely intact and uncorrupted. For piece of mind, make a physical prnt of one of the images that appear to be distorted or corrupted. You can do this with your own printer, use an online print service like Walmart or copy the image and go to the store to have a print made. My guess is your image will be perfect (or as perfect as the original image that was created by you and your camera!)

Once you have confirmed that the image itself is fine, there are several things you can try.

First, try different graphic display and management applications, most of which are free. I recommend trying Picasa first. I suspect that the root of the problem could be one or more of the following:

Different grapics applications create screen images using different methods of rendering the image to the monitor, depending on the resolution of the original, the size of the image being displayed and/or the resolution settings of your monitor.

The second challenge could be your video card; how much discrete (video memeory vs shared) memory the card has; are you using the latest driver for your card and OS; are the video card and monitor configured with optimal settings to work together.

Again, I would do the simple task of verifying that your images are still completely intact by creating a print from the image on the shared storage. Once your mind is at ease that your images are good, you can avoid the many time comsuming and dangerous tasks some have recommended here and ignore the fear and panic that is being instilled and focus on the real issue: How to make your pictures look great when viewing them on your computer.

Good luck. Coach in Canada

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My problem was in the writing...
May 7, 2010 11:56PM PDT

I had the same problem just the other day--a large grey bar occupying about a third of the picture. I had just copied the jpg files from my SDHD camera card; pasted them to a folder on my computer. All were fine, except for this one picture. I went back to the card and copied/pasted the same picture again and all was well.

In my case the duplication process failed. I suspect the write-behind buffers were interrupted--I was in too much of a hurry. At any rate, the original picture was fine; it was the transfer process that caused the initial grey bars. A second copy attempt solved the problem.

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Who corrupted the images?
May 8, 2010 12:46AM PDT

This is a bit of a stretch but...

I had some scanned documents stored as *.TIFF files on my system. The files were viewable by a variety of programs. Later, to help classify them, I would right click on them, and in "Properties", under the "Details" tab, I would "Add a Tag". So far, so good. But I *did* notice that the files got a LOT bigger. For example a 7K file, after the two word "tag" phrase was added, grew to 13K. This surprised me, as the file was not being "tagged" off on the side, it was instead being re-written with the tag information somehow embedded.

The result? Several of the programs that could previously read the *.TIFF files, now said the files were corrupt, while other programs could still easily read the files.

Is it possible that you have used some photo album type program, that may have inadvertently modified the files in an effort to catalog or organize them (or retouch them)? If so, there is a glimmer of hope. If you can find the original program that modified your files, then it's possible that *that* program can still read the files, even if your *current* program shows up with the gray bars.

One clue is to check the date the files were last modified. Do those dates correspond to when you think they were *created*? Or is that date much later, when perhaps a well-meaning program *modified* them?

Like I said, it's a stretch, but worth noting.

p.s. I was using Vista which corrupted the file when the tag was modified. And it was a Microsoft Office Document Imaging program that claimed the files were corrupt....while some third-party programs could still read them. Microsoft. Go figure.

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Gray Bars on Photos
May 8, 2010 1:04AM PDT

Funny, I'm having that problem too and have no clue. When I go to attach a photo, I go to the memory card from the camera and there are MANY that show up w/the gray bar so I wouldn't think it had to do w/anyone needing more info. Corruption sounds more likely. Is there a way to "fix"?

Thanks.

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How to fix your images
May 8, 2010 1:59AM PDT

I can't tell you why your files got corrupted, but I can tell you how to fix your images - assuming you have the latest version (CS5) of Photoshop. Select the gray bar and then click on Fill and choose "Content Aware" from the Use box. It will fill in the gray bar with content from the surrounding pixels. The fix will be almost invisible if the gray bar is not too high.

Steve

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Digial Photos with Gray Bars - I had something similar once
May 8, 2010 2:03AM PDT

I won't go over what anyone else has commented on already.

But i have had this happen a few times - here's the first. I had a new camera and shot a bunch of really nice pictures of a baby. I transferred them to my pc with a card reader. Almost all the photos had the gray bars and were no good - corrupted. I still had the photos on the card and used the cable that came with the camera. (it was for 'fast cards' in the old days) - they transferred intact.

However, did you view them way back when you transferred them? I've read almost all of the posts - but can't now remember everything i read. Did you also back up on cd or dvd?

If none of the suggestions others wrote (drive incompatibile with current OS, etc.) - try to remember how you backed them up to the hard drive.

Right now, i'm backing mine up to dvd, blu-ray AND external hard drive. And now i'm reminded i'm a bit behind, so i'm going to back up!!!

Sorry if they are lost. (i would at least try some of the recovery methods suggested).

In conclusion, i found using 'slower' card readers corrupted the files during transfer (when using 'faster memory cards'.

Good luck!

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File Type
May 8, 2010 2:40AM PDT

I'm not shure if this can be a solution, but I've heard that JPEG or JPG files lose quality each time you move them or make any change on them, so if you can do it, you should change the extention to a TIFF file, they are much more secure manteining the full file's quality.
Sorry for my english, I actually speak spanish.

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Changing the extension don't change the type
May 8, 2010 4:37AM PDT

Files need to be opened and re-saved to change their format. JPEG files can be re-saved without quality loss, if no cropping was done or edits to the image itself made. For example, the meta data can be edited and the file saved without changes to the image quality.

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Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars on t
May 8, 2010 5:07AM PDT

I've had the same problem recently whenever I tried downloading pictures from my Canon 20is using a cable connection. If I use the card removed from the camera I don't have that problem.

Sory I don't know how to fix your particular problem but perhaps my story will solve a similar problem for someone else in the future . . . .

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this is the correct answer.
May 8, 2010 7:31AM PDT

I saw one correct answer. You must have downloaded another picture editing program since your initial photo storage and opened them with this new program. Your old JPEG's however, were transcoded with the program you stored them with years ago. For example, there is an old program that came with a lot of printers back in the early 90's called MGI PhotoSuite. All my photos were, and now are, edited and stored with that program are on a separate hard drive with that program on that drive. Many NEW photo management programs encode, via transcoding, an extremely small amount of the billions of pixels in your photos making it impossible to open it correctly with a new program like iPhoto or Adobe PS. The naked eye could never see this. It's very clever.

I know this because I have experienced it. I shoot movies, videos, and do photo restoration, via downloading, other peoples photos and videos. I have worked with nearly half a million photos and other photo/video mediums. I have over 100,000 photos stored and I don't have a problem any more because I only use ONE program to work with them all. Its over 15 years old but it works.

What you need to do is open those old photos with the program they were stored with and hopefully all should be OK. Then re-save them into a BITMAP for ever. Then open them with another program as a BITMAP ONLY. JPEG's are for amateurs and are a best guess rendering of the original. THIS IS ON PURPOSE BY THE JOINT PICTURE EXPERTS GROUP (JPEG). A JPEG IS THE ORIGINAL FORM OF DRM AS A MULTI-COPY PROTECTION SCHEME.

For this reason I will not let any software change my JPEG settings or any settings at all. I will never use any HP, Apple or other program as they heavily transcode photos used with them making it only editable and reusable by that program. Good luck!!

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Hard to understand
May 8, 2010 2:46PM PDT

I know BMP and many more formats are lossless but SIZE is HUGE and time consuming. The eye can not detect the difference between JPEG and BMP and, today photos are stored as JPEG.
What do you propose? not to use JPEG? Or not to use Apple software? PS?

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i've experienced the same issue
May 8, 2010 10:05AM PDT

I have had exactly the same problem with digital photos on an external hard drive - gray (and greenish) horizontal bands across some of the images and a few cases where a part of the image is offset and not lined up with the rest.

In my case, I believe all these photos were transferred from CDs or DVDs to the hard drive. My suspicious always has been that there was a glitch in the transfer process.

I can't say the photos were shot with any one particular camera. I have used several brands and models through the years.

These irregular photos are a tiny fraction of the thousands of photos I have shot, stored on CDs and transferred to an external hard drive (again various makes and models). To illustrate the small number, there could be 100 photos in a folder and maybe only one or two is banded or distorted. And out of 100 folders, maybe only one is affected.

My guess is that my irregular shots were taken about the same period as the person who asked the question.

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Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars
May 8, 2010 11:59AM PDT

I suggest you check the power supply of your external hard drive. If the drive is not sufficiently powered it could generate such error. Typically USB powered devices must have a minimum 5 volts power supply to it, suggestion is using a double USB cable (two connections on the PC side to ensure sufficient power) or if your are using a power adaptor then check to ensure the adaptor is not faulty.

Alternatively replace the drive external box with a newer one or install the hard drive directly to the PC.

Hope this help

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A simple suggestion
May 8, 2010 10:20PM PDT

My first thought if this would happen to me would be to try the external drive out on a totally different computer say a friend or family members.
This is assuming your pictures were probably just copied from the computer or card and pasted on the external drive.
If the pictures look fine on theirs then you may have a software issue on your computer.

My other suggestion is never trust just one source for protecting your precious files. Any kind of storage device that can be written to is not guaranteed to protect your data. I know it's a pain in the rear but backing up your important data onto a quality CD or DVD and properly storing the disc is the best proven method for saving it. And it's the cheapest! I have some 12 year old cdr's that still read fine after all this time and weren't really stored properly.

There are other options such as setting up a RAID setup, Online storage, etc. but sometimes the simple solutions work best.

Also your problem almost sounds like the data may have gotten corrupt. I have seen similar issues "bars on pictures or part of them missing" when recovering files off a deleted flash card. I"m cross my fingers for you for luck as I hate to see someone loose photos especially if there of family.

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Added to...
May 9, 2010 6:27AM PDT

In an earlier reply to this thread, I mentioned that the Sandisk card reader cured the problems. What I failed to mention was that in testing all of this out, I tried offloading the pictures via both methods to different directories. The results were always the same in that out of a 25 pic d/l directly from the camera to a folder, about 3 or 4 pictures would be corrupted with the splits and gray bars. Then I would take the card out of the camera and offload the same pics through the Sandisk. The pics were 100% every time which told me that the card itself did not hold any corrupted files. The corruption came from the use of the USB cable that came with the camera. Just thought I would add this bit of clarity.

...Steve

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Post pics and publish link.
May 8, 2010 11:10PM PDT

So that every one can see the pics and suggest you proper answer. Without looking the pics I can not give you proper answer or solution.

May be lot of dust is there on your external hard drive.

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Group Featured Member Solutions?
May 9, 2010 2:57PM PDT

Lee:
Is there any chance that you might be able to group all the featured members? suggestions under one link, rather than require us to link onto each one individually? It seems to me, that this was how it was done previously, or am I thinking of another site? While I often times look at more than just the featured solutions, it does require a bit more effort this way. If you can't group them, how about using some way to distinguish them when reading or scrolling through all the entries?

Thanks;
Jim K - nbsc

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Digital Pics
May 9, 2010 11:03PM PDT

the guys here have explained how the storing of pictures works and I agree with most of the comments.
I have had the bars as you describe ONLY EVER when the full file was not downloaded, copied or saved in total. Did you ever actually open the pics on your external drive previously and see the pictures as they should have been? If yes then I suspect that your external hard drive is dying and you should run a full diagnostic on it and maybe you can recover some of your pictures. If you never tested when you copied the files then it could also have been an error with your old system. Try coping all the files into directory and open it up with windows set to preview, watch and see if the complete picture is shown before the bars appear, or as the picture actually disappears. Another senario is that your external drive was almost full as you were copying the pictures, which used to corrupt some files, you could try copying from the command prompt a "FEW" files to see if this makes a difference.
Sorry for the vague reply.

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Warning: a really bad pun follows:
May 10, 2010 12:06AM PDT

If you have that much external drive, stay away from gay bars.

(I told you it was a really bad pun - but I just couldn't help myself - sorry...)

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Simple problem of crosslinking.
May 10, 2010 12:59AM PDT

This is not a problem with the particular hard drive, power supply, photo editing software, bad sectors (you would have gotten error messages) or any of that. My God, superstition abounds.

The symptoms are definitely indicative of bad data in the files, either causing them to truncate or causing glitches during image reconstruction. Some display software may handle this better than others, but the files are corrupted.

How did they get corrupted without generating any error messages? The files were crosslinked. JPG files are NOT checksummed or have any other form of error correction, AFAIK. If anyone has any ACTUAL information, please point me to the JPG spec page #. Nor do disk drives checksum or otherwise error check files as a whole. Again, don't throw superstition at me -- get actual information. I know, I've dissected disk files to their individual maps, sectors, and bits.

What does have checksums are the individual sectors of the disk. Therefore, there were no disk errors writing the files nor were there any errors ("switched bits", corrupted data, bad sectors etc.) accumulating on the disk over the years.

What happened was that sector allocation maps were not properly written to the drive, probably because you, like everyone else, yanks the USB cable on their USB drive without the "Safely Remove Hardware" procedure. The sector map doesn't get (completely) written out, and the next time you access the drive, the OS thinks it has free sectors where those sectors were already included in your image files.

There are other ways the sector map can become corrupted without generating error messages, and other ways the OS may write on sectors of the disk that it wasn't supposed to. However, every sector was written and read back perfectly. It's just that your files got overwritten somewhere in the process.

Don't try other drives, don't try other paint programs, don't try other compression schemes. Your files are permanently corrupted.

In the future, just be VERY careful about removing a USB drive. If your system ever crashes with the USB drive plugged in, or you ever forget and yank it out without doing "Safely Remove Hardware", then run a scandisk on it the next time you plug it in to make sure the files are synchronized with the sector maps.

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gray bars
May 10, 2010 3:32AM PDT

I have gray bars on photos that have edited on an older photo suite
program but if I open them the pictures are fine.I`m assuming you have opened the pics?