I have a client who has a laptop that had some pictures on it that she wants to recover. I won't bore you with the details and cut right to the chase. I have managed to recover all of her data, but there is one folder (with subfolders) that the files won't open. They are all JPEGs and they all appear to be pretty small in size. Most are around 600 KB but some are as small as 3-5 KB. If you try to open any of these files, Photo Viewer comes back with the message "Windows Photo Viewer can't open this picture because either Photo Viewer doesn't support this file format, or you don't have the latest updates to Photo Viewer.". As far as I can tell, everything is up to date.

Any ideas on the root cause or a solution on this one?

I often use XnView to get a view of, and save as, damaged pictures. The 5kB ones are not going to yield much. Probably just the built-in preview thumbnail.

Drag and drop one into internet explorer see if it loads. Make sure its not a problem with the viewer.

Update:
I've tried opening the files with GIMP, Paint, XnView and probably a couple of other programs (all on 3 different systems--Vista and 7) with no luck. I've done some Googling, but I haven't come up with anything. My guess is that the files are corrupted and there's nothing I can do about it, but I'm hoping I'm wrong. I'm waiting to hear back from the client, but I'm betting that these pictures all came from the same SD card and the files have never been able to be opened. They were probably corrupted at the source.

Has anyone else come across something like this before or know of a solution?

Are the thumbnails visible in explorer?

Xnview will show at least parts of the JPEG if they are damaged or corrupt. But 3kB ones won't have much in them.

I'm not able to open them in any program. Even Xnview gives an error when trying to open a file.

I did speak to the client and she said that they were able to opened at one point. She started reorganizing her files and noticed that she couldn't open any that she put in this new folder. She was able to see a thumbnail of them, though. Later, not even the thumbnail would show up. That's where I'm at today. No thumbnails and they won't open at all.

Thanks for the help. Keep the ideas coming.