Corrupted NEF files from Nikon D90 after hard drive failure

[eyan212]

I just returned from a trip to Haiti and took about 1600 photos while I was there. On the way home the hard drive on my Apple macbook pro died. I was able to recover most of the drive and about half the photos but about 900 of the photos are unable to be opened/previewed. I have scanned the camera's memory card and recovered all I can recover there.

I have a disk image of the failed drive that I used to recover all the data. The only thing I am having an issue with is the 900 photos. The files were already stored on the computer before the crash and I had worked with most of them in Lightroom. The corruption occurred just before or as a result of the crash. The files have no metadata (aperture, shutter speed, exposure, etc) and no previews but I can see that they are all about 12mb. They retained their title and timestamp.

Will exiftool help me in this situation? I am a complete noob when it comes to using terminal and exiftool.   

[eyan212]

I ran the fix corrupted NEF file script and got the following results:










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Elliott-Yanceys-MacBook-Pro:~ elliottyancey$ /Users/elliottyancey/Desktop/fix_corrupted_nef/fix_corrupted_nef.pl /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-207.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-208.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-209.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-210.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-211.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-212.NEF /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti\ Day\ 1-213.NEF
---- fix_corrupted_nef version 1.9 ----
Fixes Nikon D4/D600/D800/D800E/D3200/D5200/D7100 NEF images that
have been corrupted by transferring with older Nikon software.

Bit depth of compressed images (12 or 14) [14]? 12
Fixing 7 files...
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-207.NEF [1/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-207.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-207.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-208.NEF [2/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-208.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-208.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-209.NEF [3/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-209.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-209.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-210.NEF [4/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-210.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-210.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-211.NEF [5/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-211.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-211.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-212.NEF [6/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-212.NEF
Error: File format error - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-212.NEF
======== /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-213.NEF [7/7]
Error: Not a D4, D600, D800/D800E, D3200, D5200 or D7100 NEF - /Users/elliottyancey/Pictures/2014/2014-03-28/Haiti Day 1-213.NEF

[Phil Harvey]

Sorry, but the fix_corrupted_nef utility is only for NEF files corrupted by the Nikon software, not by disk problems.  Sometimes you may be able to recover the previews from other corrupted NEF files using my extract_preview script, but this requires that you have Perl installed.

- Phil

[eyan212]

Thank you for the help. It didn't work. I was able to extract the preview from the healthy files but not the corrupt ones.

Any thoughts? I really need these photos...

[Phil Harvey]

It sounds like the files are lost, but if you want to email me a sample I'll take a look (philharvey66 at gmail.com).  Your best hope may be a sector scan of the disk using specialized disk recovery software.

- Phil