Как восстановить файлы JPG, которые превратились в папки на портативном диске?

As long as your hard drive is still spinning, you should not give up trying to access your files! You might be able to recover your files completely or partially in the case the filesystem did get corrupted.

First of all, do not write anything new to the hard disk drive. You might overwrite your image files if the filesystem is somehow corrupted.

Secondly, you can try to access your hard disk drive from another operating system, e.g. Linux, and see if the problem appears there as well. This is the first step I would take, since I'm used to using Linux and it's free. One boot / recovery CD that I often use is the GParted Recovery CD. If you're not comfortable with this, maybe the next step will do the trick.

As a final option, you could try a file recovery program to fix your files. There are many free applications that can do this. I've used FreeUndelete with success a while ago. It can be downloaded from here: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete

Good luck!

If they were originally jpg images and now directories then something got really corrupted. There is no way to "enter" the directory because it never was one. I think your jpgs are as good as trash now.

If the corruption hasn't spread too far, then your JPEG files are now marked as directories (and so irretrievable by normal undeletion/recovery tools, which would recover them as directories or, worse still, believe them to be too corrupt and permanently clear them), but the image data is still there.

Recovering it isn't guaranteed and isn't fast. You need to access the portable drive in device mode, i.e., as if it was a single very large file. On Linux you would do that by dd'ing its contents to a new file on the fixed drive (provided there's enough space). There is a utility in Windows called WinDD which could help you.

At this point you have to make a big assumption - that your JPEG files were stored as contiguous (i.e. defragmented) data blocks. If this holds, then the big file that is your portable drive contents will look like:

<garbage><garbage><valid JPEG header><valid SOI chunk>....<valid EOI chunk><garbage>... 

and a file scanner will be able to start saving data as soon as the valid JPEG header is encountered, and go on until the End-Of-Image chunk is encountered. The blocks thus extracted will make up a valid JPEG file, for which you'll have lost the name, but that is a minor hurdle, I think.

There are utilities (I seem to remember "SDrecover"?) that are designed to recover data from unreadable SD cards. Of course they're not limited to SD cards (unless they require a FAT32/exFAT format on the device, which is a stupid request). They work in the same manner, reading sequentially the drive, ignoring everything they can't read, and trying to extract valid image streams. Some of them are capable of "juggling" the valid JPEG image chunks they find, and thus recover even fragmented files. But the key to the recovery is

• do not write anything else on the drive
• do not run any "disk fix" utility
• if possible, make a "clone" image of the disk
• if possible, work on the clone, not the original
• use the appropriate tool

You can find other tools (freeware, even) by googling for "JPEG recovery from damaged SD card", and synonyms thereof. I even have some Linux tested C source code, in case you feel adventurous and are comfortable with compiling.