[AT] Computer HELP!! Lost Photos

[charlie hill]

Ok I find myself needing to borrow the expertise of the computer pros on the 
list once again.

In March I put  several hundred vacation pictures from Hawaii in a file on 
my desktop (computer desktop).  My intent was to edit some of them and later 
load them to CD.  I've been in the file many times and looked at the pics 
and all was well.   Last night I tried to open some of the pics and they 
won't open.  I get a message saying the file is "broken and not in usable 
format".  The computer still recognizes them as .JPG files.  The file names 
are still just as the camera named them.  The file sizes seem to be roughly 
the right size.
There are also a few video clips in the file and they have the same problem.

Does anyone know a way I can recover them?  If someone knows how to get 
inside and look at the files maybe I could send you a couple of them.   I 
still  have about half of them intact on a camera media chip so I have 
something to compare them to is someone knows how to do it.

Here is what I think might have happened.  All of the files show to have 
been modified on Oct 31.  It was about that time that I started out to load 
them to CDR.   I thought all of them would fit on one CD and that if they 
didn't the computer would promt me to load another CD.  When I tried to load 
them the computer told me they wouldn't all fit and wanted me to make a 
change.  At the time I couldn't figure out how to handle and had to leave. 
I don't remember ever going back and addressing the issue.  However, I think 
I have looked at some of the photos since then and they were ok.  The only 
other issue I can think of is that this computer is dangerously close to 
being out of disk drive space and I have yet to remove some stuff that would 
help solve that problem.

The photos that are missing are every photo I took on the island of Maui 
including the road to Hanna or Hana or whatever that town is and a whale 
watching trip.  Fortunately I e-mailed part of the whale pictures to a 
friend so I have those in my sent e-mail file but that still leaves me with 
several hundred priceless photos gone.

Thanks

Charlie