X-Ways
·.·. Computer forensics software made in Germany .·.·
 

Retrieving lost JPEG images from Compact Flash cards,
SmartMedia cards, and other media using WinHex...

 

A testimonial about a successful recovery by Keith K. (USA), May 19, 2004:

Herr Fleischman,
I truly want to thank you for this wonderful product. It saved over 150 GB of my personal and professional information. I am currently stationed with the U.S. Army in Wurzburg, Germany, and work in computer automations and communications. Over two years worth of irreplaceable digital photos and videos of Germany and surrounding countries were stored on my drive; WinHex retrieved every last one of them. Often, in the software industry, you don't typically receive your money's worth for a product. WinHex earned every last cent. I appreciate your time, and will now recommend WinHex to any friend or colleague who has encountered a similar data recovery issue. I also appreciate your understanding with my decision to change payment methods, and the prompt refund of my original payment. Your company's professionalism has clearly proven itself. Thank you again.
Respectfully,
Keith K.


A testimonial about a successful recovery by John Haroian III (USA), November 1st, 2003:

I appreciate your well thought out product.  It, in fact, has been invaluable.

I recently experienced a hard drive crash on a 30G IBM Deskstar.  I sent the
drive to a data recovery service for retrieval of the hundreds of digital
pictures contained on the drive.  They were unsuccessful due to the severity
of damage to the drive's surface.

I did have a partial backup done in September.  It was partial because I
lost (erased?) the second CD of the backup set.  The backup set was limited
to the digital picture collection.  The backup program was unable to read
the backup set without the second CD.  Your program was able to extract
approximately 700 pictures from the first CD.  My wife and I were ecstatic
since we have recovered from the years 2000 to early 2003.  We are only
missing this summer.  Since we have two young children, your program has
saved many lost memories for my family.

Thanks again.

John Haroian


A testimonial about a successful recovery by Sofie Haesevoets (Belgium), September 1st, 2003:

I just wanted to let you know that I managed to recover 119 pictures from our trip to Bankok which we thought were lost, using winhex. We went to a photo-shop to let them copy on CDrom, but the guy there didn't know _anything_ about computers and ruined our (128MB!) memory card. (any photoshop-like program refused to open the pictures because it did not find JPEG headers)

I searched on the net and found the information on winhex. It was well worth the money, I have all 119 pictures back now!

Sofie


A testimonial about a successful recovery by Kevin LeNestour (Canada), August 4th, 2003:

Stefan:  The software worked great.  My daughter just came home from Europe where she spent the last five weeks in a French emersion program.  She took literally 600 pictures on her digital camera.   Something went wrong when she tried to download them and nearly 300 hundred were 'lost'.  Using your software we were able to recover all of the lost pictures (memories).

Thanks,

Kevin


A testimonial about a successful recovery by Chris Dudte (California, USA), July 30th, 2003:

Hello,

I just wanted to thank you for such a fine product. I bought my copy a while back, and use it for general binary file editing.

This past weekend, I got married in South Lake Tahoe, CA. I took a bunch of pictures with a digital camera, on a 256MB CF card. When I tried to download the pictures, it failed about 1/3 of the way through. Suspecting problems, I took a snapshot of the card with Winhex. The card was unreadable after that. I used the file recovery features of Winhex, and saved 57/63 pictures!
Thanks again for such a fine product.

Chris Dudte


A testimonial about a successful recovery by Ken Johnston (Philadelphia, USA), February 28th, 2003:

I thought I would forward the email I sent to the individual who suggested I use your program, WinHex, to try and restore files on a hard drive that I experienced problems with a few weeks back. All I can say is thank you and that if you need any references I would be more than happy to be one. I downloaded the program and within a couple hours had back files that I thought were gone forever.

I opened an email about 6 weeks ago on my old computer and the monitor went black and system shutdown. Had no idea what happened but suspected a virus despite keeping my anti-virus software up to date.

I tried to reboot nad got a message saying it couldn't find the system disk.

Ended up taking the PC to a friend''s brother-in-law and he wasable to recvoer a few small files but basically said his utilities came up short. $90 out the window. He's an MCSE, computer builder and so I thought I was out of luck. And see I have 142 reservations and a couple grand in cash for an annual retrerat I hel prun and no backup of the file and had run the paperwork through the shredder. So I was really sweating the loss of one particular file.

I had put the hard drive in my new PC a couple weeks ago and dwonloaded a program similar to WinHex and could see alot of the data I was looking for in the hex dumps but couldn't piece it together to reconstruct the file. [...]

I downloaded WinHex and onec again could see the hex and character data and was hopeful that thsi would be the program. Then I see that it's gonna cost me to get the rest of the utility. I registered WinHex around 5:30 PM today. It is now 11:30 PM and I have more files back then I knew I had. I can't believe it.


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Adam Marciniec (USA), February 1st, 2003:

After getting back from doing a photo shoot and importing the pics I realized I had them in the wrong folder.  So I click to move them to the correct one and the computer crashes.  When it comes back up all my data is gone and the card on my camera has already been cleared.  Your product really saved the day.  I'll be reccomending it to everyone I know.  Thanks again!!


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Cristy Gibson (San Francisco, USA), January 22nd, 2003:

It's working, it's working!!!!! You and your software have made my day. All I had to do was recover by type and change the file size. Now I have proof of my adventures in Australia!

Thank you so much!!!!! These pics are incredibly important to me, especially since these are moments that can't be recreated. I spent New Years Eve in Sydney and to have that experience and not be able to share it through my pictures would be so disappointing! I am so glad that your software is available to those of us who need it!!


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Warren Harris (Texas, USA), November 11th, 2002:

Winhex saved the day!  I had just returned from a trip to San Francisco
where I photographed my stepdaughter's wedding with my Olympus 3000.  When I
attempted to unload one of the 128 meg Smart Media units on my Windows 2000
workstation, there were no images.  I knew they had been recorded, as I had
gone back over some of them in the camera the day before.  Windows Explorer
showed 122 of 125 megs used, but no files.  My Recover4All Pro was unable to
recover the files, as they had not been deleted -- the fat was hosed.  After
fine-tuning the Winhex recovery parameters I was able to retrieve all of the
photos from the Smart Media. Hot Damn!

Thanks for the great product!


A testimonial about a successful recovery by Steve Goebels (USA), September 7th, 2002:

Dear Stefan,

For the past 10+ years our family goes on a fishing trip to the Sierra Nevada Mountains around the Labor Day Holiday. Every year we go, we hope to catch one of the "lunker" trout that exist in some of the lakes. We have caught plenty of fish over the years, but never one in excess of two or more pounds. Well, this year was different. We finally caught a five pound rainbow trout and took plenty of digital pictures on our Olympus C3040 camera. When we got home from the trip, I rushed to download the pictures onto our PC. In my overexcitment to review the pictures, I accidently erased all pictures on the smart media card and was in a state of shock. Realizing that our trip and related fish pictures was destined to become just another "Fish Story", I regained my composure and started to search the internet for any type of assistance to recover the pictures from the smart media card. As part of this search, I found your WinHex product. After reviewing the evaluation download and related testimonials, I decided to purchase a copy of the software. The full version WinHex product recovered all 112 files, both JPEG and Movies that were erroneously erased from the card. I am extremely grateful for your product. It really helped me out of a jam and allowed our family retain the memories.

...by the way, for the doubtful, I've attached a picture (resized to email) to show you one of the trout pictures recovered.

Thank you and best regards,

Steve Goebels


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Ambroise Nève (Belgium), August 6th, 2002:

Hi Guys,

I just wanted to THANK YOU so much!
Thanks to WinHex, I was able to recover more than 150 pictures that I
thought lost for ever!
In fact, I don't know what actually happened with my SmartMedia card
reader but it apparently destroyed the SmartMedia card, making it
impossible to read nor from Windows Explorer nor from the FujiFilm 6900Z
which displayed an error message when I inserted the card.
I surfed the web and a forum where people were complaining about the
same problems... And one of the posts braught me to WinHex which I
immediately tried. As I was limited to 200K when exporting in the demo
version, I got a licence immediately and I can say, now that I recovered
my pictures (or at least 98% of them), that it was worth paying 39
EURO!!!
The recovery took me about 3 hours, but what are 3 hours when you know
you are recovering 15 days of souvenir?
So thanks to you guys, my pictures gallery will soon be online on my
website... Fiewwwwww :-)

Regards,

Ambroise Nève
http://ambroise.neve.be


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Mark A. Keener (USA), November 7th, 2001:

Stefan:

I just wanted to THANK YOU for your help! After accidentally deleting the images on a Compact Flash card containing pictures of my wife's first baby shower, I was a very unpopular person... But with your help, I am again a hero!

With Gratitude,

-MK


A testimonial about a successful automatic recovery by Stéphane Vallières (Canada), October 14th, 2001:

Hi,

i've found by searching, your AUTOMATED JPG RECOVERY ON A DIGITAL CAMERA...

YOU SAVE MY LIFE !!!

Thanks to share your knowledge on the Internet.. it's very very very appreciated...

this morning i've climbed a big mountain in my town... i'm not the kind of men who clim mountain everyday :)
and back home, my 80 photos was unreadable on my nikon coolpix 880... (i've fomartted my card with my computer this morning, before leaving)... so now, i have all my photos :)


Thanks again !


 

A testimonial about a successful manual recovery by Michael Chergoski (USA), March 28th, 2001:

Hi Stefan,

My name is Michael and last month my wife and I visited the new Disneyland park, Disney’s California Adventure, here in California. I took along my digital camera as I always do on such trips. I filled one 32MB flash card module and nearly filled a second 32MB module. I knew we could always reflect back and remember the wonderful time we had on this trip with the many pictures I have taken, as I have done on so many other trips.

Shortly after we arrived home I wanted to retrieve the pictures of our trip so I loaded the first module into my card reader and began to transfer the pictures to my computer. Just as the transfer began, the computer malfunctioned and the driver for the card reader failed. I removed the card from the reader and solved the computer problem and managed to get the card reader driver running again. When I placed the flash card back into the reader I discovered that it was the second of the two cards and not the one I had in the reader when the problem occurred. I thought, no big deal, I’ll just read the second module first. While trying to attempt the transfer I received an error stating that the card could not be read because of improper file format. I was not sure what was wrong at this point so I removed the card and ran some system tests to find that all seems to be well.

At this point I placed the module back into the reader only to encounter the same problem. I then placed the first module into the reader and began the transfer. This module transferred all the pictures successfully. I then placed the second module into the reader and it was at that point I noticed all the files had the same names as all the files on the first module. What had happened was when the computer first failed with the first module the file directory for that module had been buffered and when I got things working and placed the second module into the reader the file directory was restored, but to the wrong module.

I put that module aside with the hopes of eventually finding a way to retrieve the pictures without the use of the file directory. I eventually tried Norton Disk Doctor but that did not help. I tried a variety of disk utilities including other hex editors but none could do what I needed to do. All the hex editors I have tried worked on a sector or file bases. I had no reliable file directory to work from and I needed to work on many sectors at a time. Nothing I found was able to do the job I needed to do. I was beginning to think that those pictures were gone forever.

I then went to the Internet in search of something that would help. That is when I came across WinHex. I downloaded a copy and began to play around with it when I discovered this is exactly what I need. I went back to the WinHex web site and purchased a copy and got the data I needed to make the copy I downloaded a full version. Last night I used WinHex and retrieved all the pictures from the module with the bad file directory, all 54 pictures were saved.

I knew what the header looked like for a JPEG image and all my pictures are in JPEG format so WinHex made it very easy to find and retrieve all pictures. All I had to do was search for the JPEG header, search to the next and copy everything including that header to the start of the next header to a file . I kept doing this all the way through the module until there were no more headers.

If I ever have to retrieve lost data from my flash card modules again, I now know I have the perfect tool to do it. There have been other times I needed to modify data within a binary file and this will be my new default tool to do that also.

WinHex is a great product, I’m glad you created it and I’m glad I came across it when I needed it most. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to be able to finally see all the pictures I have taken on my trip. For a minimal investment I have the memories for a lifetime in my pictures thanks to WinHex.

Sincerely,

Michael Chergoski

 

If you have similar problems, please read these instructions in the WinHex forum or try Davory - data recovery made even easier!