Digital photography & design software forum: Digital photos stored on external drive have gray bars on them, help!

This is not a problem with the particular hard drive, power supply, photo editing software, bad sectors (you would have gotten error messages) or any of that. My God, superstition abounds.

The symptoms are definitely indicative of bad data in the files, either causing them to truncate or causing glitches during image reconstruction. Some display software may handle this better than others, but the files are corrupted.

How did they get corrupted without generating any error messages? The files were crosslinked. JPG files are NOT checksummed or have any other form of error correction, AFAIK. If anyone has any ACTUAL information, please point me to the JPG spec page #. Nor do disk drives checksum or otherwise error check files as a whole. Again, don't throw superstition at me -- get actual information. I know, I've dissected disk files to their individual maps, sectors, and bits.

What does have checksums are the individual sectors of the disk. Therefore, there were no disk errors writing the files nor were there any errors ("switched bits", corrupted data, bad sectors etc.) accumulating on the disk over the years.

What happened was that sector allocation maps were not properly written to the drive, probably because you, like everyone else, yanks the USB cable on their USB drive without the "Safely Remove Hardware" procedure. The sector map doesn't get (completely) written out, and the next time you access the drive, the OS thinks it has free sectors where those sectors were already included in your image files.

There are other ways the sector map can become corrupted without generating error messages, and other ways the OS may write on sectors of the disk that it wasn't supposed to. However, every sector was written and read back perfectly. It's just that your files got overwritten somewhere in the process.

Don't try other drives, don't try other paint programs, don't try other compression schemes. Your files are permanently corrupted.

In the future, just be VERY careful about removing a USB drive. If your system ever crashes with the USB drive plugged in, or you ever forget and yank it out without doing "Safely Remove Hardware", then run a scandisk on it the next time you plug it in to make sure the files are synchronized with the sector maps.

Yes I have opened the pictures many times using Microsoft Picture manager.
thanks-

I doubt that the problem of seeing the gray bars has anything to do with your present computer operating system, amount of RAM, etc. Easy to test that by opening the photos on another computer. My guess is that you'll still have gray bars. Sounds like a file corruption problem to me. A recovery process could work but is usually pretty expensive. One suggestion already given - try to use a photo program like Photo Shop to doctor some of the photos - is a good one. Rotten problem. I wish you the best.

I had this same experience with a project I had with www.intimateconnexions.co.uk and am still having problems resolving it so thanks for the suggestions - I will visit the links on the thread

I am experiencing the same issues...split images, gray bars, split and differing colors except these are the images stored on my internal hard drive not an external drive. I finally found a limit to my limitless patience! I have approximately 14K photos stored on my drive, with more being added weekly. The issues I mentioned above are becoming more prevalent.

For me the problem seems to be only on my Vista machine. I took the SD card out of the camera and loaded the pictures into the card reader on XP machine and no problems..they were fine. I then took the SD card and loaded it into my Vista machine and I noticed that about 20 of the pictures were corrupted. I used GIMP and did a "save as" to the same name and they all appeared to be fine so I copied the file to my hard drive on the Vista machine and three pictures showed up as being corrupted. I attempted to use GIMP again but this time GIMP generated a corrupted file error message. So I just deleted the corrupted photos.

I hope someone finds a fix for this.

Seeing your original message here about "grey bars" on long stored photos on your external drive.

I came to the web for answers- The first site I see is CNET with your lament and no apparent solution.

I just purchased a brand new Toshiba 1 Terabyte externam drive to transfer (copy) all of my photo images and store them from my Toshiba laptop. I just raran the copy command last night of all 21,000 images to the new external drive. I just visually checked them and found many or most to have colored horzontal bars of many colors of corruption through most of them. This is apparently a broad and common problem that comes in many colors and flavors.

Can anyone advise me too?

Thank you,

Mark

I had the same problem BUT discovered that if you cycle back and forth through the pictures, the bar would sometimes move slightly up or down (they were horizontal). Thumbnails showed completely with no bars. The pics also viewed well on other computers. I have changed the resolution and found that certain resolutions solved the problem. Unfortunately those resolutions caused problems elsewhere. Haven't had time to explore further but my guess is bad or inadequate driver or some incompatibility. Anybody have any thoughts on this?