File Format Error on recovered CR2 files

[benvanaken]

Hi Phil and Exiftool community,

I've recently made a terrible mistake. After taking wedding pictures, I was so distracted that I had deleted my CF card and shot a whole bunch of new pictures on the same CF card (thus actually overwriting them)
I've managed to recover the original pictures, but I cannot open them in any application (File Format error).
After reading various topics on the forum, I've tried Exiftool by installing the ActivePerl + full ExifTool distribution + extract_preview script.
The Exiftool is renamed to Exiftool.pl and relocated together with the lib directory to my c/windows to be included in the path.
The Exiftool extract_preview script has also been copied into c/windows

This is one of the outputs from an ExifTool command I tried

F:\>perl c:\windows\exiftool.pl -w _preview.jpg -previewimage -b F:\test
Error: File format error - F:/test/DMG_9092.CR2
Error: File format error - F:/test/xMG_9006.CR2
Error: File format error - F:/test/xMG_9007.CR2
Error: File format error - F:/test/xMG_9008.CR2
    1 directories scanned
    4 image files read
0 output files created

Whatever I seem to do, I always hit that "File Format Error"..

I'm afraid that the pictures are beyond repair, however, it's also completely possible I did something wrong when trying to exiftool them..
Is there anyone out there that can help me or suggest other ideas?

These pictures were taken at a friend's wedding with a Canon 5D Mark II, if I could somehow retrieve any of the 300 pictures lost, It would already be a huge success..
Thanks in advance,

Ben

[Phil Harvey]

You are running exiftool, not extract_preview.   Try this:

perl c:\windows\extract_preview F:\test

Even when exiftool reports a file format error, there may be embedded JPEG images that extract_preview may extract.

Good luck.

- Phil

[jcd]

Hello,

I am having very similar problems. Lightroom telling me that my CR2 files are corrupted. No idea how this happened as 50% of the CR2 files are fine. This was for a job so I am really panicking here. I tried to extract the jpg preview using this command

exiftool -b -PreviewImage -w _preview.jpg -ext cr2 -r /media/images/digikam/rawpeg

(but with my folder path)

No luck, just says file format error for every corrupt file.

Really needing help here! Will appreciate anything and everything!

I would attach one of the many corrupt CR2 files but they are too big (over the 10mb attachment limit). Will email a file to anyone interested.

Thank you very much in advance.

James

[Phil Harvey]

Hi James,

Send me one of the corrupted images and I'll take a look.  Me email is philharvey66 at gmail.com

- Phil

[jcd]

Hello Phil,

Thank you very, very much for your speedy reply. I am sending a couple now through wetransfer.com

James

[Phil Harvey]

Hi James,

I'm sorry to report that these files are full of nothing but binary zeros.  So there is nothing that can be recovered from them.

I'm surprised though that the zip download from wetransfer was so large because if it zip it myself the two files compress to 158 bytes (not the 55 MB of the zip I downloaded from wetransfer -- so wetransfer doesn't compress the files at all).  This is one way to tell if the files contain all zeros -- if they do then the will compress down to just about nothing.

- Phil

[jcd]

Hi Phil,

This is extremely sad news but thank you very much for taking the time out to have a look at my files. I really appreciate it.

Kind regards,

James