Corrupted JPEG files

So here's a bit of a pickle my partner and I found ourselves in recently. Their Canon point-and-shoot, which had been working perfectly fine up until now, suddenly turned rogue on us, botching an entire weekend's worth of photos. Just to paint the picture - the day before everything was ticking along nicely, and the memory card was fairly new, barely broken in, and definitely not mistreated or overworked.

In a bid to salvage what we could, I gave a couple of free jpeg recovery tools a whirl, but no dice - they couldn't fetch anything back for us. Interestingly, running chkdsk did manage to claw back two images and dumped a pile of .CHK files in a new folder. These files clearly hold some of our precious memories (judging by the data size), yet they're stuck in limbo, and I'm scratching my head on how to breathe life into them again.

Post-crisis, I gave the card a thorough formatting (after rescuing the unreadable files, of course). It seems to be in good working order now, happily storing new memories. The camera, too, is chugging along fine with a different card.

Now, I'm reaching out to this brainy bunch for some wisdom. Got any tricks, tools, or wizardry up your sleeves to transform these inaccessible files back into cherished photos? Each attempt to open them either hits me with a "file cannot be read" brick wall or the software plays dumb, claiming it doesn't recognize the file type.

Any advice or suggestions to untangle this mess would be golden.

Thanks a million in advance for helping us out!

Cheers!

A couple of suggestions -

Try re-naming one of the .chk files to .jpg and see what happens. It will likely be a partial photo, but better than nothing.

It's always best to low level format new memory cards in the camera that they will be used in, before using them, and do a regular format in the camera when you again need to format them. Memory cards do work better when this is done this way.

Charley

Agree, every time I dump photos from a card, I reformat the card.  I have had two many errors with cards.