Computer Expert help - photo files corrupted

[MeridasMum]

All of our digital photos and videos from the past 20-odd years have been held, very safely (I thought) on an external hard drive. They are family pics and videos of my kids from babies.

I used to access these from an old laptop that started 'dying'. I kept powering it up and accessed the hard drive to the very end of life of the laptop. It finally gave up and I bought a new one.
(I'm describing this as I wonder if the dying laptop killed the hard drive?)
Please forgive the vocabulary - it's the best way to describe without knowing tech terms.

When I tried to access the hard drive from the new laptop, all the files had corrupted and I couldn't open anything.

I took the hard drive to a local computer shop and the man there downloaded 'some' of the photos (maybe 100 or so) but no videos.

DH insists the rest are gone. He's more computer savvy than me and talks about the binary numbers that make up files are out of order and can't be fixed. However, I think that they MUST be there somewhere. If they were evidence of crime, the police could find them surely? I think I need to find someone who knows more than the previous guy.

Does anyone have any ideas please? I'm desperate and can't sleep thinking about all those memories just gone.

No advice I'm afraid but I feel your pain because the exact same thing has happened to me.

Oh I'm sorry this has happened to you too. It's awful.

Of course we still have our actual memories but they are prompted by pics. And I'm thinking of when my kids are older and have their own families, there will be precious few pics of them to pass on.

It's wonderful that we have tech to allow so many more photos of our kids than our parents would have had of us, but, unless you print them all (who does?!?!) this can happen.

I really hope
Someone has some words of wisdom and advice 🤞🤞🤞

https://recoverit.wondershare.com/computer-problems/restoring-corrupted-files.html

The SFC/Scannow command was always our first go-to when I worked in general IT support.

I wouldn't use system restore unless you were in the habit of regularly setting restore points. Most people's system restore point dates back to their install date.

Thank you. I almost did this but DH advised it would delete everything so I left well alone. He knows a little but not enough!

You can get them back, OP. If the scannow command doesn't work and you can afford it, take the HDD to a PC specialist.

Data is never deleted until it is overwritten. Even when you delete a file the data stays on the system, all that is deleted is the file path and the command telling Windows not to write on that part of the disc.

I don't know about photo recovery but I have would start uploading photos to an online photo storage site. Eg Google Photos

https://www.ontrack.com/en-gb

Its expensive. You’ll never not have your files backed up again.

Some good suggestions up above, may be expensive though. If you do manage to recover them I recommend using an online photo storage site to avoid this issue in future (I use two because I'm paranoid).

I will, for sure.

Our recent pics - past few years - are on the cloud as we use iPhones. I thought an external hard drive was the solution for older pics. I need to do more research on that.

There are companies that specialise in recovering data from corrupted drives, but I think they are expensive. I did wonder if the new computer is in some way incompatible with the old hard drive, but if you have had an 'expert' look at it probably not that. Similarly are you using the same software to access the files as before. If possible I would try to get hold of an old pc running the same operating system as your old one and running the same software, not very hopeful though. I assume you hadn't backed up anywhere. Where were they originally if you have put them all together on the hard drive? Do you have the original media? Disks, cards, etc.

When you save a file to a disk, the data is not necessarily held contiguously, but can be broken up into smaller blocks all over the disk. It's the job of the file system (think of it as a a set of indexes) to keep track of where all your files and their data are stored, and also to track free space where new files can be written.

If that index becomes corrupt, it can loose all the information to retrieve a complete file, or it can mark parts of an existing file as free-space that can get over-written.
In many cases the operating system will try and de-clutter your disk and re-arrange the data to speed up access and remove small blocks of free space that can slow down data read/write requests, this is often call de-fragmentation. If that goes wrong, it can corrupt the file system's indexes.

There are tools that will try and retrieve all of your files, but you have to accept that some will be irretrievable.

Similarly are you using the same software to access the files as before. If possible I would try to get hold of an old pc running the same operating system as your old one and running the same software, not very hopeful though.

That's actually not a bad idea. I had issues retrieving data from an old phone recently because my PC simply did not recognise it as a storage device. Windows 10 had no idea what this piece of hardware was. Although it is likely OP would be getting a different error message if that was the case, one along the lines of "Windows does not recognise..."

OP, if your DH knows enough to create a VM running Vista it would be worth a try to open the files in that and it would be free.

Thank you. I'll try that.

I was wondering if I managed to get the old laptop up and running, if that may recognise the file path? Not sure the laptop could be started but might be worth a try?