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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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I have gray bars in my digital pictures.
May 10, 2010 3:47AM PDT

Yes I have opened the pictures many times using Microsoft Picture manager.
thanks-

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File transfer wasn't successful (vista sp1)...try upgrading
May 10, 2010 2:24PM PDT

Happened to me too...the minute I tried to copy massive amounts of photos with windows vista (SP1). To this day, I still blame Windows Vista. I have never had any issues transfering files with xp, me, 98, etc. about 2% of my jpeg pics had grey bars on the top, bottom, or both. The files are forever corupted.

Sorry budy, I looked for a solution about 2 years ago. I think vista sp2 had a fix for file transfering. I haven't had the problem since.

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Digital photos on external drive have gray bars
May 11, 2010 8:07AM PDT

I doubt that the problem of seeing the gray bars has anything to do with your present computer operating system, amount of RAM, etc. Easy to test that by opening the photos on another computer. My guess is that you'll still have gray bars. Sounds like a file corruption problem to me. A recovery process could work but is usually pretty expensive. One suggestion already given - try to use a photo program like Photo Shop to doctor some of the photos - is a good one. Rotten problem. I wish you the best.

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File has corrupted...
May 11, 2010 9:39PM PDT

I have experienced the same issue with some photos from my old drive being transfered to the new drive.

Before I recommend what can be done, do consider taking out the whole HDD and then install it into another PC or as an external HDD drive. This is to ensure that it is not an OS issue and to ascertain if it is the file has been corrupted.

If the files has exhibited the same issue in the other PC, try copy the files into an SD card and go through some file recovery programs such as Sandisk's RescuePRO and see if the files can be recovered.

Always treat HDD storage as 'unsafe' and always burn images into reputable branded DVD-Rs (no RWs) as a 1st backup. I always have 3 hard disks in my PC, one hard disk Partitioned only for Operating system, another partitioned hard disk for My Documents. 2nd and 3rd Hard Disk is for my image collections with one of them as a working Hard disk for image manipulation. So at any one time I would have at least 2 back up of my images.

Hope the above helped

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Vibrater
May 13, 2010 8:54AM PDT

I had this same experience with a project I had with www.intimateconnexions.co.uk and am still having problems resolving it so thanks for the suggestions - I will visit the links on the thread

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my experiance
May 15, 2010 11:12AM PDT

I've formatted by mistake my hard drive containing thousands of private pictures..didn't have backup copies and when i found a way to restore it. In thumbnails view it looked that pics are complete but when I clicked them ,I saw same thing - fckin gray bars ..I tried many things to repair them but it seems that parts of pics data are lost forever, coz after formating system was installed..I doubt that you can do thing bout it.Wish you luck!

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I have the same problems with my digital photos!
May 18, 2010 6:06AM PDT

I am experiencing the same issues...split images, gray bars, split and differing colors except these are the images stored on my internal hard drive not an external drive. I finally found a limit to my limitless patience! I have approximately 14K photos stored on my drive, with more being added weekly. The issues I mentioned above are becoming more prevalent.

For me the problem seems to be only on my Vista machine. I took the SD card out of the camera and loaded the pictures into the card reader on XP machine and no problems..they were fine. I then took the SD card and loaded it into my Vista machine and I noticed that about 20 of the pictures were corrupted. I used GIMP and did a "save as" to the same name and they all appeared to be fine so I copied the file to my hard drive on the Vista machine and three pictures showed up as being corrupted. I attempted to use GIMP again but this time GIMP generated a corrupted file error message. So I just deleted the corrupted photos.

I hope someone finds a fix for this.

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Look for things in common
Jun 13, 2010 11:58PM PDT

When you look at your photos that have gray bars on them do you notice anything in common, like are all of the pictures of incarcerated prisoners or zoo animals? Just a thought.

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'Corrupted bars' in digital images stored on external drive
Mar 5, 2011 12:40AM PST

Seeing your original message here about "grey bars" on long stored photos on your external drive.

I came to the web for answers- The first site I see is CNET with your lament and no apparent solution.

I just purchased a brand new Toshiba 1 Terabyte externam drive to transfer (copy) all of my photo images and store them from my Toshiba laptop. I just raran the copy command last night of all 21,000 images to the new external drive. I just visually checked them and found many or most to have colored horzontal bars of many colors of corruption through most of them. This is apparently a broad and common problem that comes in many colors and flavors.

Can anyone advise me too?

Thank you,

Mark

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Corrupted files (photos) when copying to new external drive
Mar 5, 2011 12:53AM PST

This answer to the original question to someone else here was somewhat helpful but all this talk about old software does not apply to my question that I just entered below in response. I just made all new photo files uploaded from my same camera and software for the past years and right up to moments ago. When I have copied them all now to the new external hard drive, many or most of the photo files when the new opened files are retrieved from the new external hard drive, have colored horizontal bars randomly through many of the photos. This is all compatible software as smae make and standard equipment. A high grade nearly new Toshiba laptop and the new external drive is a Toshiba; the camera equipment is a Sony Cybershot and just brand new Sony Alpha NEX5. All files were originally transferred and created to Photoshop CS5 as many formated TIF, Jpeg, Camera Raw. It does not seem to matter what format- It seems to be that the general copying to another drive is losing integrity somewhere.

I know that you probably need more information but I feel like Dave in 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the HAL9000 computer kills Frank and then Dave asks HAL "Do you know what happened?" HAL: "I'm sorry, I don't have enough information."

You may also have my personal email to respond readily: markscomiclight@gmail.com

Thank you for any response and/or help,

Mark

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Corruption or Resolution
Oct 7, 2011 10:59PM PDT

I had the same problem BUT discovered that if you cycle back and forth through the pictures, the bar would sometimes move slightly up or down (they were horizontal). Thumbnails showed completely with no bars. The pics also viewed well on other computers. I have changed the resolution and found that certain resolutions solved the problem. Unfortunately those resolutions caused problems elsewhere. Haven't had time to explore further but my guess is bad or inadequate driver or some incompatibility. Anybody have any thoughts on this?

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Sony Cybershot
Oct 7, 2011 11:09PM PDT

<span id="INSERTION_MARKER"> I should have mentioned that I am also using a Sony Cybershot.