Need help! Repairing CR2 files!

[Lee V]

Hi, i shoot a wedding recently and downloaded all the photos (Canon raw- CR2 files) from the CF card to hard drive, all the photos have the correct file sizes and If i’m scrolling down i can see the small previews perfectly but the problem start when i open the files. 

few days after i opened the files on lightroom and all the photos from the card are corrupted! I tried open the files in alot of programs but in every program it was damaged photos. 

Since this wedding i shoot 2 other weddings so i over wrote the memory card so can’t recover from the card.

I’ve tried every program that was recommended on the web include ExiftTool, cr2 repair and Hex editor but i can’t really understand how to handle file metadata.

I read in another topic that there is a chance that the header of the file is unreadable but there is a possibility that changing the data of the file can fix the problem. !?

I’m in desperate need for help because I'm out of options and don't want to have to tell this couple I have lost their photos. anyone knows how to handle file metadata on CR2, repair CR2,  have any recommendation on what to do or can do the work? 

every success even b&w/ small jpeg or every thing that can be rescued will be helpful.

[zhangm Supervisor]

I've worked with a few images that Lee provided via PM.

 

Here's an older thread with some details of the workflow that I tried:

 

https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1189919-need-help-will-pay-someone-familiar-with-repairing-cr2-files/

 

Briefly: snip out the high-resolution JPEG embedded in the CR2 and cut our losses with the RAW data. That strategy doesn't work in this case, and unfortunately I've hit the limits of my own (very little) understanding of JPEG and RAW file formats. I've tried dcraw, and this seems to do the JPEG recovery (viewable but mangled), as well as pump out a TIFF file. Both are corrupted - there seem to be bands of different exposures, slightly offset horizontally, running across each image. The TIFF file from the RAW data is more difficult to interpret.

 

dcraw does spit out an approximate location where it says that file corruption is present. I don't know enough of the file structure to find anything wrong by gazing in the hex editor. Maybe there are expected data lengths and checksums somewhere for chunks of the data?

 

Edit. For anyone on Windows, I got the dcraw binaries here:

http://www.centrostudiprogressofotografico.it/en/dcraw/

[Draconian Guppy]

I've succesfully recovered photos in the same scenario (overwriting due to new shooots) as yours using recuva,  around a 75% success , recovering some, some remain corrupted)

though there are other deep file recovery options