DNG File Repair/Recovery

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446
Name
Gary
Edit My Images
Yes
I am hoping some of you may be able to help me.

I recently had a backup fail on a hard drive and it appeared the partition on the backup drive was corrupted. I therefore tried to sort it out, but somehow (and I still don't know how) I managed to delete the partition on my primary images disk containing all my images.

I was able to do a recovery using Recuva, but some of the DNGs will not import into Lightroom because it thinks they are damaged or corrupted. I presume I will be able to extract the jpeg previews because I can view them in other editors.

My questions are:

Can anyone suggest any software for repairing corrupted DNGs?
Is there an easy way to extract the Jpeg preview from a corrupted DNG?

I have seen something called Stellar Repair for photo, but it doesn't have a trial version, so I can't see if it will actually work for what I need. I don't want to shell out for something if it isn't going to work.

Thanks in anticipation.
 
I was able to do a recovery using Recuva, but some of the DNGs will not import into Lightroom because it thinks they are damaged or corrupted. I presume I will be able to extract the jpeg previews because I can view them in other editors.
These might not be actually corrupted but files that were deleted but only partially written over - in which case you cannot repair them.
 
One other thing to be aware of is that every time you write to a disk that might still contain recoverable images, you risk overwriting them permanently. This is especially tricky if the primary image partition was on the same disk as your OS. If this is the case, the safest thing would probably be to put the drive in a different computer, or boot your computer from a Linux CD or USB. You can run PhotoRec from Linux (make sure the output doesn't go to any disk that might contain recoverable images):

https://www.tecmint.com/photorec-recover-deleted-lost-files-in-linux/
 
I have recovered the files - I did that using Recuva. The issue I have is that the files I have recovered will not import into lightroom because lightroom says they are damage. I am looking for something I can run on those images to repair them.
 
Can you open the files in any other programme e.g. ifranview to see if they are intact and it's just a LR issue.
If you can, then maybe you can import them into LR from the other programme.
 
Can you open the files in any other programme e.g. ifranview to see if they are intact and it's just a LR issue.
If you can, then maybe you can import them into LR from the other programme.

I can view the preview by opening them in the windows picture viewer, but I presume that's because it can access the jpeg preview. I will try irfanview and see if I can then open them with that.
 
Saving grace is that it's only your backup drive that's failed and not the drive which contain the original live files. Instead of faffing around trying to recover failed backup files just buy a new backup drive and run a new backup. Testing the backup on regular will give you an indication of the quality of the backup.
 
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