[BITList] Epiphany

[HUGH]

Not religion, but my computer.  I had an old hard drive that was mostly used as a slave to one of the others but, unfortunately, all my photos were on it when it got corrupted doing something innocuous a few weeks back.  A local repair man recovered the contents for £30 and put all the photos, Excel files and doc files on a DVD for me, hundreds of them, all named Recoveredjpeg124.jpg, etc, etc.  All but around 50 opened and could be renamed for reconstruction of the filing system, but I needed to know if the ones that wouldn't open were important, or could be done without.  A trawl through the web produced many accounts of jpegs that wouldn't open, with various solutions suggested, most of which didn't work for those asking, and none of which worked for me.  So I was stumped, but not for long.  While it's unlikely that others on BITList will end up in my situation, it might be useful to know a way out of it, and the one I found is quite simple. Copy all the unopenable files into My Pictures or whatever file the system uses for wallpaper.  They open as wallpaper via Control Panel/Display.  Thus armed, I found 90% of these files are either completely blank or substantially blank (caused by the recovery process), and the others are duplicates of openable files - all of them have 100% readable versions elsewhere on the DVD.

Hugh.
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