corrupt photos

Hi all

         I have a problem, when I open my dedicated photo storage drive and brows to a folder usually the photos open ok, but occasionally some thumbnails show as multicolour and corrupt some others have a red X in place of the picture, the latest photo with the red X shows in a folder I have just opened it is a single photo in an album of stored photos in a folder which has been stable for about 8 years, has anybody any ideas what could cause this? Regards Robert  

You can try running chkdsk /r on the partition where the photos are stored.

The causes of corruption are varied, Data corruption and loss causes and avoidance - http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/datacorruption.html .

Louis

Hi Lous

          Thanks for your quick reply and your interest, I did a chkdsk a couple of months ago and everything was fine, after searching online I do find that most people think that the type of corruption which scrambles the photo or makes a section of it grey is caused by the user transferring the images by card reader and not using the camera software, so I have now started using a data cable to transfer the images from the camera to the PC, but I cannot find a reason why some thumbnails show a red X instead of the image, especially in an album which has been ok for years. when a thumbnail with a red X is clicked upon it usually says "unknown file extension" while still showing the .jpg underneath the missing image, so maybe its the extension which is somehow corrupt?  Regards Robert

Hope you have other backups ?

Otherwise it could be vast issues to something simple.

1/ Try another Program to Open them.

2/ Ensure the Hard Drive has no issues.

3/ Try opening the Photos on another PC.

This may give clues or narrow it down.

Also try rebuilding your icon cache.

Hi Guys

    Thanks for the ideas, I do have my photos backed up on a memory stick and as I have some old IDE hard drives so I could use one of those to make another storage drive, I have also tried opening them with XnView and the corrupted files still showed as corrupt, I know the hdd is ok, although I don't have access to another PC so I could try them on the TV, not sure what you mean by the (icon Cash?)  regards Robert