I have many JPGs and used XP's defrag many times and it did not hurt them.
So, I suspect something else is goign on.
However, I have heard of fancy photo album software that keeps thumbnails of
the JPGs. Some people erase the JPGs to save space, thinking that the
photos are in the album. In reality the album contained only pointers to
the photo files, which are now gone.
But, if you simply copied the photos to the hard drive, then they should
still be there, UNLESS they were copied to a temporary area, and then you
ran a cleaning program.
Try an experiment. Make a irectory called photos or similar in the root of
C:\. Take a few digital pictures and copy them to that area. Unplug the
camera form the PC and opent he files via double-clicking in windows
explorer, using internet explorer or MS paint or other standard program to
view them. once you are sure that the test photos are on the disk and
readable, perform a defrag. Then, verify that the photos are still there.
Should they be gone, then you have something really odd happening. Think
about viruses.
However, there is some (small) chance that some of these photos may be
recoverable, since defragging only moves files that are still listed in the
directory. It does not move files that have been deleted. However, it can
over-write deleted files or parts thereof.
Anyway, there are dozens of file recovery programs to try. Most cost a few
bucks, but a few are free. Try a web search on "FILE RECOVERY" or
"UNDELETE".
For the future, please consider getting in the habit of doing backups of
files that are important to you. CD-Rs are probably one of the best ways of
doing this, but there are others. Even if you solve the current mystery,
note that hard drives can crash or be atacked by malicious oftware.
RAKENHOUSE said:
PLEASE CAN ANY ONE HELP ME, I AM A BIT OF A NOVICE AT COMPUTERS BUT I DOWN
LOADED A LOT OF PHOTOS FROM MY CAMERA , WHICH WAS FINE UNTIL I DE FRAGMENTED
MY COMP AS IT WAS DUE FOR ONE. NOW ALL MY PHOTOS HAVE VANISHED SOMEBODY, AT
WORK HAS SAID THAT EARLY XP HAD A FAULT WHICH WIPED OUT JPEGS IS THIS TRUE
AND WHAT AND WHERE DO I DOWN LOAD, I FEEL QUITE NERVOUS ABOUT DOWNLOADING
PHOTOS UNTIL IT IS PUT RIGHT .
