Pictures lost, how can I recover them?

jumanji said:

It does appear complex and daunting for the first time user but once you play around with it for a while , you will get a grip on it. And if you use PhotoRec you can run it any number of times and it is absolutely safe since it does not write anything to the drive under recovery. There is no way you can mess up with the drive under recovery even if you do some mistakes.

As for copying the recovered files to an external drive, My external hard drive suddenly became unllocated: (applies to PhotoRec also)

EDIT: Here is a booster dose :) for you Best recovery software? (Windows 7)

I left it running over night and it found the same sort of files as the others, loads of browsing history stuff, work pictures etc but not one of my pictures section. It seems very odd to me that nothing can find a single one of these pictures?

whs said:

Hmm, that suggests that your pictures folder was already corrupted for a while. But are you certain that you drilled down to the correct pictures folder - C:\Users\Your Name\Pictures

Thanks WHS, it's odd that nothing else is missing though isn't it?

I only have one users on the computer but checked the public one too. Also tried doing a search for all .jpg files but none of them were found.

Well, I don't know why all photos in that folder went missing.

But if I remember correctly there is one setting in Windows Media Player which says " delete from the library but do not delete the original (wherever it is)" or something like that. Unless one checks it, if you delete the file in the Library , it will also be deleted in its location. Do you remember anytime you had all your photos in the Windows Media Player library, selected those enmasse and deleted those from the library? I am just guessing.

Hello,

Just to update people on this as I don't like to start a thread and not post a solution if I find one.

Although Recuva didn't work on my laptop or external hard drive where the images had been stores I got my old PC out, set it back up and ran the software on it. Again the were 1 million + images found and it did contain my personal pictures.

At an estimate I think around 10% of pictures were lost due to file corruption but I would call this a great result all considered.

Rikki