[RobOman]

Tried to help a man save his pictures. Hard drive lost NTFS partition and could not be seen used a program to recover files and it looked like it worked (1st NTFS File recovery 2.10) transfered files to another drive then set up his drive with NTFS and format reinstall his system then replaced his documents back to his computer. File structure looks fine size of files is right each picture file is around 1.4 MB so something is there but when you try to open a picture it says no preview available. and will not open. Are the pictures lost or can they still be saved?

[bp936]

my guess is, if it is a new install, maybe Windows has to be told again, what file-program should open a *.jpg file (I assume)
You know,

Explorer,
Tools,
Folder Options,
File types
the *.jpg => open with <enter program you us> if Windows doesn't suggest one.

[RobOman]

Have tried several but that was my first thought also thanks

[JustinPS]

Have you tried changing the file extension to different image formats? Try .tif or even .gif and see if it will open that way.

Do you have an image editing program that you're able to open one in? They will give you a lot more info about the image than just right-clicking. If you've tried opening the file(s) in an editing program already and they won't open because the file type is unrecognized or something like that, see if they will upload to something on the web, like a flickr account.

If none of those work, then I'm not sure of other ways to open the images...maybe a free image viewer like Infranview?

[Hughv]

Open your image viewer first, then navigate to the file and select "Open".
Notepad will open any file-see if the header info provides any clues.
Upload a file so we can see what's up.

[Elvandil]

Chances are that the recovered files are corrupted. This is not uncommon during recoveries since damage to the file system causes the start and endpoints of the files' locations on the drive to be mistaken. What is "recovered" is sometimes gibberish.

I'd suggest trying a recovery application that allows for choices of the start position of the partition. Sometimes there can be several and the recovery app does not know which to use. If the wrong one is chosen, all files on the drive are shifted by a number of bytes. GatDataBack and the advanced options in EasyRecovery allow those choices. Probably others. But try a "recovered" file to be sure it is intact and if not, try different settings.