[man0fsteel]

More specifically, are my jpegs recoverable?

Details -

I was attempting to upgrage my Sony PC's OS from Me (which stunk from day one) to Win2000. Prior to this, I was dilligent and backed up all my files that were of importance (mostly jpegs of my little boy) to CD.

Then during the upgrade, something went haywire and the install failed. After a number of attempts to re-install Win2000 (never reformatted, just kept re-running the install disk), my PC barely boots up, with lots of "missing xyz.dll" file error messages. Needless to say, none of my old files show up when using explorer.

So I was about to format the drive and start all over from scratch, but when I tried to open the jpegs on my back up CDs on a different PC, all the jpegs wouldn't open! I couldn't even copy them from the CD to the hard drive. After some research, it appears the headers records are really screwed up on the jpegs (strangely, all the other files are fine) and there is other corruption as well, making recovery difficult, if not impossible.

So I'm wondering if the jpegs are still recoverable from my HD. I tried using a competitors product to no avail. It found thousand of jpeg files but none of them were viewable.

Any advise?

Thank you