jpeg repair

im attempting to help a cow-orker recover data from a compact flash card, and i am able to retrieve all of the pictures off of it. but they all end up... less than whole
http://l0ser.net/images/cluster 241.JPG (edit : large linked image)
does anyone know of a way to recover the rest of these images?
as near as i can tell, it appears to be the whole file. maybe corrupted in some way?
any help is greatly appreciated

I believe that the image as posted is screwed. Both xv and the gimp complain that that the file ends prematurely, ie there isn't enough data to fill the image as described in the header. What is interesting is that the filesize is 1.44MB. This might just be a coincidence though. Can you check to see what the other filesizes are?

im not sure, but i think that that may be a feature of the camera
i do have 13 images that recovered in whole. they are the same size (physical) as the rest of the partial images
all images (whole and partial) weigh in at 1,474,560 bytes

edit : recovered 10 more good images. upped number from 3 to 13

edit edit : oddly enough, the 13 recovered images were from the higher clusters on the card. seems to be more than coincidence until i look at all of the broken images breaking at roughly the same point. (about 1/3 of the image at the top being displayed)

Yep, that's the problem. For whatever reason, the image files have each been truncated to the maximum formatted capacity of a floppy disk.
Are you using a floppy drive at any time in the transfer process? If so, then the files on the card may be ok. Otherwise, I'd _guess_ that since once upon a time Olympus had a floppy-based camera that some legacy code in their firmware might be responsible, and then the files on the card are probably bad.

although i see your point, im gonna have to argue it
ive done recovery for this person before
every picture ive pulled from his cards have weighed in at this size. i just went back and checked. my guess is that all of the data is in the broken files. just a guess.

when i view in ACDSee in thumbnail view, all of the images appear correctly.
is it possible to have thumbnails embedded in a jpeg, or is it piecing them together correctly for the thumbnail and, for some reason, not for the full size?

EXIF headers can contain thumbnails and most digital cameras use EXIF. I don't know if that one does or if it embeds thumbnails in them, but it's certainly possible.

The thumbnail (briefly) appeared correctly in Adobe Photoshop CS using the 'Browse' window. It was then updated to reflect the data present in the file, which is just the top section and then a portion of the top section again. This supports the embedded thumbnail hypothesis.

The Exif data looks complete FWIW.

-Zeke

EXIF headers can contain thumbnails and most digital cameras use EXIF.

Yeah, JPEG files can contain EXIF headers can contain thumbnails, which are stored in a TIFF-formatted block, which contains a JPEG file. Nutters.

Heh. Can the JPEG thumbnail contain an EXIF header that contains another thumbnail?