[TheZMan]

I surmise that you've never used the "thumbnail" feature on your computer's file manager.

If you're trying to recover a drive's data you don't start at image thumbnails. Before you do anything you look at the files that are no longer accessible either directly or indirectly, with the latter being preferable such that you don't accidentally perform a write to the drive which risks losing more data. The fact I brought up hex parsers should tell you I know quite a bit more about this than opening an explorer window.

[r9etb]

If you're trying to recover a drive's data you don't start at image thumbnails.

So? Who says the Geeks spotted the stuff right away -- wouldn't they have been more likely to have spotted it later, while checking data integrity on a healthy disk?

The fact I brought up hex parsers should tell you I know quite a bit more about this than opening an explorer window.

And the fact that you brought up hex parsers told me that you hadn't fully thought through the scenario.