[StarDust]

Some very important photos are suddenly unreadable by my computers, weeks after having viewed them before and even processed some images. They don't work in Bridge or Photoshop CC or CS6.
What could have caused this error? Has my disk destroyed these images or is it some other wierd thing? Is it repairable or am I screwed?
The funny thing is that the thumbnails (filmstrip) in Bridge before processing them look completely fine, until they are processed. That makes me believe that it is some read error that camera raw makes...
Really need some help here, I'm beginning to panic, I don't have backups of these.
Here is the original DNG: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9788974/_IMG0787.DNG

Attached Images

View Picture EXIF

File Date

 

[Na Horuk]

Ouch, bad luck!
Were these on the hard drive the whole time, or were they waiting on an SD card?
Can you try opening these with a different program?
The reason why thumbnails look okay is because the dng is a container, it contains the raw data, metadata (exif) and preview jpeg thumbnails.

[ruggiex]

That sucks.

I have this issue happened to me once a while, but worse, the file would be unreadable at all. Suddenly, a couple images on my networked drive would become corrupted. I use Lightroom from a different computer that reads images from the networked drive. I'd check the hard drive for bad sectors and there's nothing wrong with the hard drive. However, I've noticed that it has yet to happen to me after upgrading to Lightroom 5. (However, I haven't used 5 as long as I have with 3 or 4 yet so there might not be any correlation.) Ever since then, I started using online backup service so that I can restore the file whenever the corruption happens.

Check the hard drive for any type of error in case the hard drive is on its way out would probably be my first step... Good luck!

[Miguel]

Bad news, the DNG file you provided shows what you fear.
The best possible outcome would be to salvage the smaller jpg that resides within. I believe there is software for that, but it will take homework on your part.

M

[StarDust]

I'll just jump off a bridge then...

[dansamy]

If they are on a hard drive, recovery software may help. http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

I used that program when I formatted a hdd that I *thought* I had back ups of the pictures.

[StarDust]

I'm working on this as we speak. The problem is that I don't need to recover files, but repair them. I tried PhotoRec which found files that I had deleted from that folder and some others as well, probably on the same physical place on the drive earlier. Unfortunately the ratio of corrupted - non-corrupted files was about the same. It seems that several sectors might be bad. At least I can salvage some not so good photo's from the deleted ones and use them but if someone knows a way of repairing DNG's, any tip is helpful.

In the meantime I'll continue to try and repair the files and I'll post my progress here.

[Na Horuk]

You might want to take that hard drive to a trusted professional, who might have more knowledge and better tools for recovering data.

Hope you salvage it

[StarDust]

That is an option but not a cheap one.
Progress report:
I found a program called PixRecovery. I've tried the demo which puts big blobs and logos on the photo but does recover some photos, all is not lost but I will have to check with my fiancé which these photos are most important for since I was shooting her at the ceremony. The downside is that it recovers them as 8 bit BMP's. The price for the program was about 50USD. I just have to figure out how to tell her this bad news...

[dansamy]

Salvage what you can. And buy a new drive.