[AT] Computer HELP!! Lost Photos

Larry D Goss rlgoss at evansville.net
Tue Dec 11 07:56:47 PST 2007


Look at the properties of your hard drive and check the percentage of space 
available.  It's possible that you don't have enough cache left to open 
them.  For some strange reason, this is often a percentage value of the 
total storage space available rather than an absolute value.  When the 
amount of free space falls below 20% very strange things like you are 
describing start occurring.  On a laptop that I used to own, I got this sort 
of flaky response to big files (like photos) and I would have to delete 
unused programs and files in order to get free space and get things back to 
normal again.

This "unwritten" rule goes back to the early days of microcomputing.  I 
first heard it at a corporate seminar sponsored by IBM in Chicago back 
around 1983.  You would have thought that would have changed by now, but my 
experience has shown otherwise.  The disk image of the CD for writing the 
material may still be on your hard drive.  It may help to simply run the 
disk cleanup routines.

YMMV.

Larry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "charlie hill" <chill8 at suddenlink.net>
To: "Antique tractor email discussion group" <at at lists.antique-tractor.com>
Sent: Tuesday, December 11, 2007 7:39 AM
Subject: [AT] Computer HELP!! Lost Photos


> 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
>
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