I have been working for weeks on a photograph restoration project. Today when I tried to load the picture in Photoshop 7, I was told that my picture could not be loaded because of a "Disk error". I am loading the picture from a second hard drive. I have tried "chkdsk", I have sent my hard drives through defrag., I have done a disk clean up, I have tried to move the picture to my main drive but got a cycle redundancy check data error.
Can anyone help me? I worked on the pic and saved it without any problems that I know of. If anyone can help me or can lead me to a helpful site, I would really appreciate it.

Karyn

Was the 2nd drive over a network? I've heard of problems like this when saving files over a network (not recommended).

Thanks for the response
No the second hard drive is on my main computer. I can access all the other pictures on the file, just not the restoration project. I really do not want to start over :depressed

Karyn

check the file name carefully. sometimes i make a mistake when altering a file name and put the revision add-on partially after the period, such that my file might end up as kraellin-.1jpg or some such. easy to do when working with multiple save-as's.

also, a common one is to save a psp or psd file with a mistake in the file type extension (.jpg, .psp, .psd, etc.) try altering the extension with a rename command to a different extension type, like, if you see a .jpg, change it to a .psd. in fact, that may even account for the file error message you're getting.

the other possibility is that you wrote over a sector error that was never caught or just occurred. this may make the file un-recoverable as is, but, and this was for win98, there used to be a programs like disk doctor from Norton and diskedit, also from Norton, that could read over these and recover most of the file data, sometimes even all. i currently dont know what would do that same thing in a Mac or windows xp, but there shld be something comparable around, if that's what's going on. try the other things i mentioned first. if those dont work, then look for the other.

and, if it does turn out to be the latter, the next time you do a defrag, do the long defrag that looks for and locks out bad sectors/clusters.

K.

I don't know if this will work but you might give it a shot. Once you have located the file, copy it to a flash drive and try it on another computer. You might also try opening the file with Infranview if your using a PC or GraphicConverter if your using a Mac.

If you do a search on the web, there are a variety of disk/file recovery programs you could try. My first hit came up with these: http://www.freebyte.com/filediskutils/#datarecovery

Thanks for all the advice, sorry I did not respond sooner, was away for a few days.

Kraellin, when I open a file, I click on the file itself, rather than typing in the file name. Thanks for the advice on the disk doctor - I will look into that. I did the long defrag and got nothing.

Caitlin, thanks for the website - every little bit of advice helps. It feels better to be able to try something.

Deadants, I would like to give your advice a try, but I am not sure what Infranview is? Please help.


Karyn

Infranview is a graphics utility that will open just about any format out there. http://www.irfanview.com/

ok, rather than try to remember this, i did a google define: and got this:

Cyclic Redundancy Check. A CRC is a type of check value designed to catch most transmission errors. A decoder calculates the CRC for the received data and compares it to the CRC that the encoder calculated, which is appended to the data. A mismatch indicates that the data was corrupted in transit

basically, what that means is, your file is corrupted. it's not your drive; it's the file itself. that's the bad news. the good news is that you might be able to still recover it, but it would take something like a bit reader, disk/file/hex editor, or maybe disk doctor to do it. if it's only the crc number itself that is off, the data could possibly be recovered. and even if it's some of the picture data you might still be able to recover it by recalculating the crc number. sorry, i've seen programs for doing that before, but dont have any and dont know the names of any. but, that shld give you a lead.

K.

Check this out, it might help,
http://www.officerecovery.com/photoshop/

Sorry for the delay in response. This problem could not have happened at a worse time.

Kraellin, thanks for the clarification of my problem, although I did not want to hear the bad news of a corrupted file. This problem is going to take time, and it appears that the file may be lost. I have become very discouraged with the idea of redoing the work.

Deadants, thanks for the links. I will give it a try.

Just a question, when you are working on a very large file, and you save it frequently, what type of backup saving do you do. I saved it on my second hard drive because my primary drive could not hold the file - scratch disks full - and not enough memory to save. Is it safe to save a large photo file on a rewritable disk?

Karyn

I could try to restore the file for you if you would like? how big is it....let me know

Sorry for the delay. This is our busiest time of Year. The file is 916 MB and is made up of countless layers. tb5821 how would you aproach the problem? Any advice would be great. It is a wedding picture of my grandparents (the only picture) and it was quite damaged. It is a project of love for my mother.
Karyn

oh my lord, 916 MBs!? that is a HUGE image file. why so large? and in fact, this may have been part of the reason for the corruption....maybe. how large is your swap file? how much space was left on the partition where this was last saved? when working on this file it must have taken forever to just apply one filter. 916 MBs is almost 1 gig. even if you had 100 layers that's 9 MB's per layer! and even if you had 200 layers, that's 4.5 MB's per layer. that's just HUGE! how much ram do you have in your machine? and even if that was typo and you meant 91.6 MB's, that's still a VERY large file to be working with all at once. i'd seriously suggest cutting down on the resolution.

Craig

Got to go with Craig on this Karyn, thats one seriously big file, and could cause all sorts of problems if you don't have the resources to cope with it. Any particular reason why its so large.

In the past I have had a lot of success with a program called EasyRecovery Pro. It is very good for recovering lost files (be it accidentally deleted, formated disks, disks gone bad etc etc). You could try it out.

oh my lord, 916 MBs!? that is a HUGE image file. why so large? and in fact, this may have been part of the reason for the corruption....maybe. how large is your swap file? how much space was left on the partition where this was last saved? when working on this file it must have taken forever to just apply one filter. 916 MBs is almost 1 gig. even if you had 100 layers that's 9 MB's per layer! and even if you had 200 layers, that's 4.5 MB's per layer. that's just HUGE! how much ram do you have in your machine? and even if that was typo and you meant 91.6 MB's, that's still a VERY large file to be working with all at once. i'd seriously suggest cutting down on the resolution.

Craig


AH!!!!!!!! :confused: You are asking me questions I cannot answer. What is a Swap file? I am not sure what you mean by "partition". My picture is stored on a second hard drive 38.2 GB left. I was new at scanning and the picture is really damaged, so I scanned big. The pic began as a 98.8KB pic. I did this before I even started working with Photoshop, and new absolutely nothing about the program. How can you reduce the file size as you add layers? As you can tell I still know very little. Your advice and help would be much appreciated.
Karyn

Sorry for the delay. This is our busiest time of Year. The file is 916 MB and is made up of countless layers. tb5821 how would you aproach the problem? Any advice would be great. It is a wedding picture of my grandparents (the only picture) and it was quite damaged. It is a project of love for my mother.
Karyn

FTP works for me, or there are p2p apps such as Mirc that would be the best way... that could transfer the file if you like...

hi karyn,

a swap file is what is called virtual memory. you also have in your machine what is called physical memory. physical memory is an actual piece of hardware. it holds things in memory, temporarily. think of it as a number of boxes where you can store information for a while. as you use different pieces of software, this gets loaded into and out of memory. it's very fast.

a swap file does the same thing, only it's a sort of software version of physical memory. on a windows based machine, a file is created on your harddrive that ACTS as if it was physical memory. this file is allocated by windows and reserves this space on your harddrive depending on how you set it up, or on how windows sets it up if you let windows manage it.

if you let windows manage it, this file will change in size according to the needs of use. or, you can set it up and allocate a certain amount of the harddrive to always be this much space on the harddrive.

as your physical memory gets used up and there's no more room in it, windows then goes to this swap file or virtual memory and uses it as if it were also physical memory. it's not, but it gets used that way when there's no more physical memory available.

if you use up the physical memory AND the swap file, bad things start to happen. files can get corrupted, the machine can slow to a crawl, you can even get crashes to the desktop or even automatic reboots. none of this is good.

generally speaking (and this is VERY general) a windows xp machine shld have at the extreme least, 256 megabytes of ram, and that's pretty bare-bones. i've even seen one machine run with half of that, but dont expect anything fast to occur. a fairly normal windows xp machine would have at least 512 megabytes of ram. and if you're running a lot of high tech games or a good graphics editing program, i'd recommend 1024 megabytes (1 gigabyte) of ram, or more.

now, if you followed all of that, you may be beginning to see why loading one nearly gigabyte image, like you're doing, into your graphics program might begin to have some problems. that image is trying to ALL load into whatever amount of ram (the physical memory) you have and then also load into the swawp file if you dont have enough physical ram. in other words, your memory boxes are stuffed, overflowing, and spilling out all over the room ;)

a partition is a section of your harddrive that is treated as if it was a separate harddrive. it's not, but it's treated as if it were. you can divide up a harddrive into separate areas that all get treated as if they were individual harddrives. this used to be quite common and even quite necessary for technical reasons you dont really need to understand here. on a windows xp machine it's now quite common to buy a large harddrive and not divide this up at all. the reasons for doing so have reduced because of techical advances.

from the sounds of it, you're ok in this regard. if you have 38.2 gigabytes left, then you're most likely just fine.

ok, moving on... you said the pic began as a 98.8KB pic. . how did a 98.8KB file end up as 916 MB? i think maybe there's been a mis-communication here somewhere. is the CURRENT file 916 KB or 916 MB? or something else. please check it again.

Craig

The current file is 960,900,931 bytes. Original was 159,930,080 bytes (I had done a number of scans - this is the one I think I used). Thanks for the definitions, Craig, am I correct in thinking that a swap file is the similar to scratch disks? It took time to load the picture, but once it was loaded I didn't find any problems. Now I wasn't applying filters, I was just correcting each area of the picture on separate layers (then if I did a correction I didn't like it was easy to fix or remove).

"FTP works for me, or there are p2p apps such as Mirc that would be the best way... " Unfortunately, I am abbreviation ignorant. Please let me know what this means.


Thanks,
Karyn

Do you have Aol Instant Messenger?

karyn,

ok, if the original scan produced a file size of 159,930,080, there where does this come from: The pic began as a 98.8KB pic. ?? 98.8KB would be 1011712 bytes, or about 1 megabyte. 159,930,080 bytes would be roughly, 156 megabytes. so, i think we have some confusions here.

but, taking your last post as gospel, if the image after scanning it came out as the 156 megabytes (156MB), then the thing to have done would be to resize it before editing. a file that large is just generally too large to be working with on a home pc. there could be exceptions of course, but generally you would cut down the file size first.

in any paint program i've ever used or played with, there is always a 'resize' tool somewhere. i dont know exactly which menu this falls under in photoshop, but i guarantee it's there somewhere. just check the documentation on where to find it and how to use it. and if you do resize, always keep your original image as a separate file name. make the resized image a new file name. this way, you've still got that super high quality scanned original to work from and refer back to.

when you do resize, you want to keep the detail but also makes things easy on yourself and your computer as far as efficiency. it's also a good idea to have in mind what you're going to do with the finished product. do you want to print it out, post it on a web site, store it for archival purposes, and so on. this can help you determine how large of a file you want to be working with, at least to some extent. generally speaking, and this is just what i use at times, i like images at about 800 x 600 pixels (a pixel is a term coming from two words, picture and element, = picture element, = pix el, = pixel) (or 600 x 800 if they are vertically longer). this keeps most of the pertinent detail while giving me a size i can work with that wont over-tax the machine. it will also make a pretty good print in most cases. this isnt always true; it's just a rule of thumb. sometimes i'll double that if it's a particularly hard image to work on. and that's going to give you a file size of somewhere around 500,000 bytes, a considerably smaller amount than your original scan.

also, i'd highly suggest buying a computer dictionary and clearing up some of these common terms. if you're going to be working with computers and digital images, it's a good thing to know the words before you try to sing the tune ;)

but, do feel free to ask. i'll help where i can.

Craig

Craig, Thanks for all your advice. I really appreciate the help.

When I quoted 98.8KB, that was a scan I had made, but after you questioned the size, I realized that was not the one I actually used. Sorry for the confusion :blush: I can't open the file I am working on, so I wasn't sure which scan I used ( I had made 4 different sized scans).

I always save the original scan and work on a copy. I was under the impression, when working on a damaged photo, the more information you can get, the better it is. I don't normally scan or work with pictures that are this big. I work with photoshop 7 and it does have a resizing tool and I use it often.

I need to print a 8X10 photo when I am finished. The original picture is 2.5X4.25 inches and is extremely damaged. Much of the information is missing - thus the large scan - I had hoped to recover as much of the information as possible.

Thanks for your help with the some of the definitions, they were very clear.

tb5821, I do not have Aol Instant Messenger, but I do have MSN Messenger.

Thanks again,
Karyn

tb5821, I do not have Aol Instant Messenger, but I do have MSN Messenger.

Thanks again,
Karyn

PM me your sn

karyn,

thank you for clearing that up :)

and, from what you're saying, what may have happened is that during a save, a crc error occurred (not your fault... it happens) and corrupted the file size or the part of the file that reports the file size, and that the file isnt really that large at all; it's just being reported incorrectly due to the corruption.

now, IF that's all that happened and is all that is messed up with the file, it may well be recoverable!

this also seems very likely as i doubt you would have been able to work with a file of almost a gigabyte in photoshop. it's not impossible, but it would have slowed your machine down so badly that you'd be waiting an hour for any changes applied to take effect. and that's why i think that maybe all that's happened is that the file size information has been corrupted and that the file isnt really that large.

i wish i knew just a touch more about this to help you out, but i think you need someone now that specializes in recovery.

good luck! if we can help more, let us know.

Craig

PM me your sn


I am going away with my family for a couple of weeks now that our Strawberry season is almost over. If you are willing to help me in August, that would be wonderful. I will PM you my sn then. There is no use doing it now because I have so little time to sit at the computer. Sorry for the delay in reply, we have a very large strawberry business and it takes up all of my time at the moment. Thanks for your patience.

Karyn