Lost Photoshop images after reinstalling windows.

[RichardKellyy]

 Hi!
 There once again everyone, and thanks in advance. I had a customer with a raid-0 array on a Win7 Ultimate  box. He had roughly 30 gigs of Extremely important pictures on the drive, Unfortunately he didn't recall them being there until a new OS was re-installed. That's when we got the machine. I've been able to recover roughly 75% of the pics through various recovery tools. Problem is that when I'm viewing these pics within a folder in thumbnail view they look fine (most anyway, some are jumbled, like the head on the feet of a person, and the sky on the bottom and the ocean on top) when i attempt to open the pics through ALL programs from coral to Adobe Photoshop  I get an initial error of File is damaged, could be truncated or incomplete when using adobe photo shop, and pretty much the same thing within all the other programs. Another oddity is that when these pics came back in the recovery they came back within the Recovered Jpeg folder, but when actually recovering and copying to a folder windows states that they were GIF. I changed the files type from gif to JPEG and anything else i could think of with the same result, I did try PIXRECOVERY demo witch i believe it fixed 1 of about 15 i tried but the demo has a big black box in the middle. What do you think?

[Spoiler]

Hi,
Windows keeps a thumbnail of the file separate from the full image. In other words you actually have 2 parts to the image. This is why you can see the image as a thumbnail but the full image that you are trying to open is corrupted.

I would try another program to do the restore.

[Geek-9pm]

You mention a Raid -0 array.
What kind of backup did you have for the array?
Any  raid array has its own set of issues. Raid 0 is a bad choice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_RAID_levels

RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume) splits ("stripes") data evenly across two or more disks, without parity information, redundancy, or fault tolerance. Since RAID 0 provides no fault tolerance or redundancy, the failure of one drive will cause the entire array to fail; as a result of having data striped across all disks, the failure will result in total data loss. This configuration is typically implemented having speed as the intended goal.[2][3] RAID 0 is normally used to increase performance, although it can also be used as a way to create a large logical volume out of two or more physical disks.[4]

In other words, Raid 0 is the worst choice for reliability and redundancy.  A well designed backup plan is mandatory for any Raid 0 system.

Sperry, this does  not  help you now. But I felt the need to warn others about your mishap. You must have a better backup plan if you wish to continue using Raid 0.