I scanned a drawing I made, along with other drawings, a while back so that I could put them into a portfolio I have to make for my college. They were all in .TIF format. When I scanned them, I opened them all up to make sure they scanned OK, and they were, and then left them for a while on the hard drive of my laptop. Eventually I went to put together the page of the portfolio that required this image, and something happened to the file. In the folder, the other scanned TIFs had thumbnail images while this one didn't, and the file size was 0 kb. I tried opening it (probably with Adobe Photoshop or MS Paint), and it was a blank white image and wasn't even the same size as the original. I assumed the file was corrupted and that I had lost it for good, and decided to just forget about it.
A few days ago, I was cleaning my laptop's hard drive, organizing things to be backed up to CDs, when I came across another copy of the same image. And with my luck, it actually opened. I put it in the same folder with other related stuff to be backed up and within an hour backed everything up to two CDs. There were additional copies of this image in other folders (I have no idea why I put it in multiple folders at the time), but I deleted those and the old one that didn't work.
A couple hours later, I was again working on the portfolio and needed that image. I try to open it up, and the same problems occur: no thumbnail image, no file size, and a blank white image when it opened. I feared the worst and tried to open the backed up files on the CDs, and faced the same problem.
I tried using a demo for a program called PixRecovery 1.0, and I get the message "No data to recover detected" and the suggestion to try sending the file to their company to pay more to recover the data. I am now trying to use R-Studio Data Recovery 3 to try to undelete the other copies to see if those are also having the same problem, but I can't seem to find the deleted files with this program (not sure if I'm using the program correctly, or if they just got overwritten within the past day).
Is there anything I can do to fix the files I have, either on the hard drive or the CDs? Is there a chance that any undeleted files would be helpful if I did find them, or would they probably have the same problem as the other files? Any information would be helpful, even if it is just to tell me that the files are lost and that I should give up.
Additional information: I use Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron 1000 laptop that is probably about a year and a half old. It has a 2.20 GHz Intel Celeron processor. I'm not sure about the rest of the hardware (I'm not the most computer saavy person), but if you need any other information, feel free to ask. Thanks ahead of time for the help.
