Repair corrupt .psd file?

[John P.]

Yeah, this has been a great day.... :rolleyes:

Anyway - so I finally today sit down to do some drawing on a piece I'm working on. As with every new project I start, in the beginning of it I feel that 'all my stuff sucks'. So I've felt that way for a while now. Not sure why, but it usually goes away when the project is beginning to look OK.

Then when I start a new piece, I'm back to the 'I suck' feeling again.


-Anyhoo.... The reason I write this is 'cause I was beginning to get to a point where this piece wasn't utter suckage anymore. So I felt pretty good, since I had actually done some work.

But since I am anal retentive, I just had to tidy up the folder I was working in. My plan was to move the folder with the latest saves to the desktop, then erase the folder with the old saves(that the new saves folder was within), and then move the folder with the new saves back from the desktop, so that instead of two folders I would have only one, with only the latest saves of the project(since the old files were just 'tests' anyway, and not how the drawing now will look).


So I drag the folder to Desktop - and XP tells me "Sorry dude - you can't move that folder 'cause the files are in use. Close the program and try again."

I see that the folder has actually been created on the desktop, but since the error message said it couldn't copy the files, I assumed the files weren't in there. So I nuke the folder on the desktop, close the program, go to the original folder.......and it's empty!!!!

:scared:



:mumble:



:cry:




-So in my despair I go online and Google for Undelete software, go to one of them and buy it with Visa.
Go to recover the lost file(s), and whoopee! - it finds one of them at least - the latest save even.

I recover it, the program says it has successfully recovered it.


But of course - since this is me we're talking about - the file is corrupt, and won't open with either Painter 8 or Photoshop....
(it's .psd format, which I've been working on in Painter 8. Started the piece in Photoshop, but continued it in Painter 8 when I had bought that)


So I download a ***load of file recovery/Image viewing programs, but they don't do nothin'. IrFanView can open the file, but it just comes up as a black screen. Other programs just gives me error messages.



So - at the end of this way too long post - - do any of you peeps know of any way to 'force' open a .psd file and save it? Kinda open it as a RAW format? It had layers, but I'd be happy even if I only got a flat .bmp out of it.

If not I guess I'll have to start almost over again. Thankfully I had an earlier backup, but I had done quite some work on it. Oh well...

[Kortez]

don't know if you've tried it but a friend of mine had the same thing happen (not THE same thing, but his file got corrupt :)) and he managed to get it open with ACDSee.

Hope you manage to view it, best of luck to you :)

[WildSpruceMoose]

Yeah something like this happened to me on a dsg project I thought was a half -assed breakthrough for me. It was corrupt etc. and wouldn't open, nothing I could do :/

Goodluck whatever you do ;)

[GhostofMacbeth]

Not sure if you can use it since it is Mac only but this does a fairly decent job converting and fixing things a lot of the time.

http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm

[John P.]

I've tried all of that now, and nothing works. I guess I'll just have to start over or perhaps just start something completely different.

I tried to open it in Photoshop with the "Open as..." option, and opened it as RAW format. That 'worked', but all I got out of it was static - lots of noise.

It's just a little irritating that it may be just missing some information in the header to work properly - so I thought there would be some tool that could fix that, just like you can fix corrupt movie and music files.


Thanks for the help anyway though. :)

[Cocofuppa]

Lo there, just thought id say ive got exactly same prob, PS7 corrupted the file when the my pc froze :S Now i dunno wot to do with it :(

[ShawnYe]

Hey John P, I encountered almost the exact same problem as you a few months ago. Now I'm very cautious about moving files especially very important files.

Although I can't help you get back the files but I would just like to share some of the precautions I take now to avoid such problems.

- Try to backup files (burn to disc, duplicate files to another drive etc.) as frequent as possible. Maybe not all, but at least the last few most recent save files.

- Save as different format. I always save my WIP files as psd, tiff and jpegs just in case the psd ever gets corrupted.

- Never assume. If I want to move files, clear up some disc space or to organize the folders, I would do a copy & paste and always open up the most recent psd files just to check if nothings wrong. After all it’s your hard work. I try to copy files to the same drive instead of desktop.

I lost important project files because of this so I can feel for ya.

[davi]

yeah while working in painter7 i now save in both rif and psd on important stuff

[Cocofuppa]

Thing is with the file i lost, it was a nearly finished illustration, ready for hand-in, and then.... buggered :( Now im having to re-do the whole thing from a crappy jpeg i posted on this site :P Anyway, thats a lesson learnt i WONT forget any time soon! lol