jpeg's corrupt after reload

My friends laptop was really messed up. We did a safe XP re-install 'over the top' of itself and all seemed OK. Then he went to the "My Pictures" folder and none of the pictures were there. Everything else is OK. Music, documents, etc. So we ran Easy Recovery Pro and found the lost pictures. But only about 25% of the pictures can be opened. The rest error out with "Header missing or corrupt" or something very similar to that. I found an app called "zefrjpg" that can supposedly rescue these pictures. If that doesn't work, does anyone know how to rebuild headers for the pictures that don't open?
Many thanks.

 

i would probly take out the top u was talking about then save it on your cd or another hard drive..

 

:confused ????? Whaaa ?????
Maybe I didn't explain it correctly. What I meant was: we did a safe reload of Windows. It was re-installed on top of the old one, meaning the old one was replaced with the reload. I've done this dozens of times and NEVER had a problem like this. Everything is fine except for the pictures. They essentially disappeared but were not deleted; the headers had been corrupted. I think the corruption happened before the XP reload. My friend said he was trying to burn the pics to CD when "it just froze". He knew that it was really messed up, that's why he was saving the pics; he was going to format and reload, but the backup attempt "froze". So he shut down by holding the power button in 'til it shut off. This was done in mid CD burn and I think the pics were lost in the process. We did find the pics and recovered them, but they won't open due to missing or corrupt headers. I hope I explained this clearly. If anyone has questions, please post them.
Thanks.

 

I've heard people have had success with PCInspector
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1

 

We've already recovered the pics, the problem is most of them will not open. With the Windows Picture Viewer we get "no preview available". If I right click and select "open with" and choose Paint, or a 3rd party app, I get "invalid format" or "header is missing or corrupt" depending on the program I try to use. It's wierd... lets say we have a folder called "My XMas Pics" and in the folder is 50 pictures named "pic 001" thru "pic 050". About 10 or 12 out of the 50 pics are fine, the rest error out as described. There's no pattern to it... we have maybe 40 folders, with anywhere from 1 to over 75 pics per folder....

 

You might try IrfanView, it sometimes opens files others won't.

Also, I remember reading something a long time ago about using a hex editor to re-build the header. Something about copying header information from a good file into the corrupted file. I have no notion if that is a workable solution or not, or even how it is done.

 

The question intrigued me, and I'm waiting for the pizza to arrive, so I did some googling

Take a look at this link
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1031&message=10291113

Sounds a bit tedious and time-consuming, but if your pics are valuable, it might be worth a shot.

 

Hey, thanx man. The pics are part of my friends business, so they are fairly important to him. He's not the most tech savvy dude, but what the ..... I'll forward this info to him. Lets cross our fingers...
Thanx again!