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Thread: Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

  1. #1

    Join Date
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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    Hey guys, I’m desperately in need of some sophisticated technical Photoshop/Mac help. Last night I discovered that four of my image files have corrupted on my hard drive. These are files that took me more than 40 hours each of work each. I went to my six backup drives and to my horror I found that the files are corrupted on those drives also-- somehow the corruption makes it past the “verify” function of both Silverfast and Retrospect, so I have backed up the corrupted files (and copied over the good versions in the process).

    I ran Norton Disk Doctor on the drive and it found no problems. The files don’t open in Photoshop-- they get all the way to the end (within a second or two of opening) and I get an error message saying there’s a disk error. A “get info” check shows that the files are still on the drive-- they are taking up the right amount of room on the drive, and the Photoshop icon is still there. I tried copying the files to a new folder and the same thing happens-- the progress bar makes it all the way to the end, and then a second or two before it should complete, it gives a disk error message.

    I tried copying the corrupted file to a blank disk drive and doing a Norton Unerase, and it created a new file that it said was successful, and when I tried opening that one the same thing happened again-- it got to about 99% of the way to open, and then I got an error message saying the file could not be opened because the “color book” was missing.

    Does anyone know how I can save these files? Is there a way to open the file without a “color book”, or somehow insert one, or fool Photoshop into thinking it’s there? I already tried turning off all color management in Photoshop and that didn’t help. I also tried renaming the files, and their folders, rebooting numerous times, and doing desktop rebuilds, all to no avail.

    Oh, and I'm on PS 7, Mac 9.2.2.

    Any help would be massively appreciated.

  2. #2
    Moderator Ralph Barker's Avatar
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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    I'm not a Mac person, Chris, but it sounds like all of the operations you've been trying all relate to use of the original file, which is now corrupted. If the backups over-wrote the original good files on the alternate drive with the corrupted version, I'm not sure there is much that can be done, unless the backup system includes some form of journaling and version control, as is available with some RAID systems.

    My suggestion would be to talk to Adobe tech support to see if they might have a utility that would allow you to determine the nature of the corruption, and fix it. UNIX systems, for example, have low-level utilities that enable you to twiddle individual bits on the disk (assuming you know what you're doing, of course). If Adobe has such a utility for Photoshop files, it would still likely result in some data loss, such as truncating part of the image, however.

  3. #3

    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    My only experience with corrupt files was due to a defective RAM years ago. I regularly had messages that the file was corrupt and discovered with some horror color strikes across the images. It took me weeks before I had the idea of checking up my RAM which I did with GURU, a free shareware. I had it replaced and have had no errors since, only freezes and non destructive errors due to full disks or old SCSI links. I don't have a link right now, but if you can't find it I will mail you a copy.

  4. #4

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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    Chris, I don't really know if there's a way to restore already corrupted files. I had a similar experience with Photoshop, not just on PSD files but TIFFs and JPEGs and found the culprit to be Norton Anti Virus program. If have this program enabled, you may want to disable it before you do any kind of saving. Hope this helps, good luck, Henry

  5. #5

    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    If it is not too advanced, try running Norton unerase on your backup disks to see if by chance some of the previous versions can still be retrived. Good luck!

  6. #6
    Resident Heretic Bruce Watson's Avatar
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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    In your place, I would absolutely call Adobe tech. support and ask them. They have likely seen this before. Make sure you go above the first level of tech support if the first level can't help you. Be persistent. You might also consider the hard drive recovery services. They may be able to fully recover the file as they have more advanced tools that the OS comes with. But don't get your hopes up. It sounds like you've had one or more bits (magnetic dipoles) flip. So the file is fine, but the data it contains is not. Yech.

    In the future, consider a multistep workflow. That is, save a file for every step of your workflow. I usually end up with at least five tif files, including the original scan, the crop-input sharpen-spot version, versions for various corrections as needed, and a final output version. More files if local contrast, color corrections, or special effects are needed. This way if something changes - say the inks, or the paper, or the printer, or my mind, or the output file is corrupted, etc., I can drop back to the appropriate file and only rebuild the image as much as is needed.

    I store all files uncompressed. What I remember (and I may well be wrong as it's been years since I researched this) is that LZ compression depends on all the bits being perfect. A one-bit error can render the compressed file unreadable. Sadly, most PC/MAC file systems and utilities eschew CRC algorithms, so one-bit errors are actually likely in a 550MB file.

    I'm working with large files - about 550MB, 16bit grayscale. All the files for a particular image fit on a DVD ROM, and I store one image per DVD. It's not a perfect system. But it's the best I've come up with so far. I am, of course, open to suggestions. And, of course, YMMV.

    Good luck, and please let us know what you find out.

    Bruce Watson

  7. #7
    tim atherton's Avatar
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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    Chris are these PSD files?

    I know there are several image fiel recover utitlities out there (mainly for the digital camerra crowd) but one of them might do the trick. And a couple seem to be specifically for PSD files. A colleague also had a whole bunch disappear from her hardrive and found a utility that sorted them out.

    I'll aska round

    tim
    You'd be amazed how small the demand is for pictures of trees... - Fred Astaire to Audrey Hepburn

    www.photo-muse.blogspot.com blog

  8. #8

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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    If it happens with 6 files it could be an issue with photoshop and not the files. Do you have a backup computer to test it out on - maybe one running CS? If this works did you install any thing else on the system? Are you out of space on the scratch disk?

  9. #9

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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    Chris,

    Try running a batch process to open and rename the files as Ttiffs or something other than what they are. PS may be able to do that without opening the file all the way. You can then try to open them in PS or another program (you can download picture window pro for free and see if it can open them). And yes, get on the phone to Adobe.

  10. #10
    Founder QT Luong's Avatar
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    Help-- corrupted Photoshop files!!

    You can also try to read the files on a different OS or with a different application and then rewrite them using that OS/application. A couple of months ago I ran on exactly the same problem on Photoshop/Mac OS X. I was able to read the files on Photoshop/Windows XP. The resaved files were OK on the Mac. If you don't have a PC available, see if you can read and rewrite the files with a different application than Photoshop.

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