Topic: Somehow lost about 40 gigs of music... anyone have any advice?

[Tim]

well it looks like I somehow lost the 40 or so gigs of music that I moved onto a drive yesteday...
I got an internal drive and a USB 2.0 enclosure yesterday, went through the setup, formatted the drive and moved about 40 gigs worth of music onto it yesterday. Everything seemed to be working just fine but when I tried to access the drive today I've only been getting an error that says that E:\ is in accesible, the file or directory is corrupted or unreadable.

I went out and bought a firewire enclosure just to try something else and when I go into my computer-disk management it shows the new E drive, doesn't list any filesystem (ntfs or fat32) and it doesn't shows as much free space as there is capacity. I'm also getting the same error.

I have no idea how I lost all of that but it's definitely been erased somehow, it's as if I never formatted the drive. The music was mostly live stuff that can be easily replaced, so while it's annoying it's not the end of the world. My fear though is that I will do this again sometime... does anyone have any idea what I may have done to cause this so I can avoid future crashes?

I was hoping to start moving all of my shns/flacs over but I'm a little worried now...

[BC]

No suggestions on how to get back what you lost. But in the future when transferring files, I would use "copy" to move them over, then reboot and check the drive to make sure they transferred ok before removing the original files.
Take care,
Ben

[Tim]

No suggestions on how to get back what you lost. But in the future when transferring files, I would use "copy" to move them over, then reboot and check the drive to make sure they transferred ok before removing the original files.
Take care,
Ben

thanks Ben. I actually did that, and still got hosed....

+T

[BC]

ouch, that sucks. The only time I miss using DAT tapes is when shit like this happens...

[Tim]

ouch, that sucks. The only time I miss using DAT tapes is when shit like this happens...

It makes me a bit apprehensive about switching over mt archive of shn/flac discs to hdd's but I didn't lose any masters or rare shows.

[chase]

this may work, worth a shot.  if you know you moved all of your shns/flacs to that drive, i.e. it took a couple mins to transfer them since it's 40 gigs then i'm sure the data is there.  i'm also assuming that you formatted it using ntfs since it is a 250gig drive and there was only one partition for the entire drive.  you could try doing a quick format in windows by right clicking the drive under My Computer, choosing format > ntfs.  it says that you will lose all of your data on the drive, however a quick format of a drive in windows takes like 30 secs so i'm pretty sure it doesn't reset 250 gigs worth of 1s and 0s back to all 0s.  see, when you delete a file in windows and remove it from the recycle bin it doesn't really get rid of the data on the drive, it simply says that the space that file took up is now fair game to have something else written over it next time you save something.  that being said, if you can get windows to recognize the drive using a proper format, then you could use a data recovery tool such as FreeUndelete (http://majorgeeks.com/download4407.html)

[ethan]

Tim,

If you can't get them back give me a shout and we'll put that drive in my LINUX box and poke arounds with some tools linux has for file recovery.

-e

[taktheride]

I used an app called easy recover or easy recovery a few years ago, basically I got all I wanted off the bad drive.  I might still have the app around, I'll let you know once I get home tonight.

[mmedley.]

Use getdataback. This is what I use everytime I have a crash and it has been 100% successful on many occassions.

Archiving to harddrives is not a good idea for this exact reason IMO. Not a question of IF, but WHEN. I would back up to DVD for a "hard" copy.

Good Luck!

[Tim]

thanks guys, +T to the thread...

I tried Chase's fix but had no luck...

Ethan I'll pm you about that... thanks for the offer.

[ethan]

thanks guys, +T to the thread...

I tried Chase's fix but had no luck...

Ethan I'll pm you about that... thanks for the offer.

k...fwiw I wouldn't have tried Chase's reformatting suggestion. I wouldn't have done anything the writes to that disk until you figured out what went wrong. Reformating quickly may not over write the data blocks but it defineitly recreats the file system (which basically keeps track of what blocks on on the disk belong to what file). Without that it may be more difficult to recover.

[Tim]

honestly it's not that big of a deal, nothing irreplaceable on there just some Phish shns/flacs

[kindms]

for those concerned about moving their collections to HDD there is always RAID. And now that HDDs are as cheap as they are no reason not to do it in 1 form or another

[Tim]

could you explain raid? I've seen it mentioned before and assume it is some sort of backup...

[Scooter]

It has different levels, but one thing it can do is it can mirror in the info on drive 1, onto drive 2.  So you have a constantly updated backup copy of everything on drive 1, on drive 2.  But you have to have two of the same capacity drives.  So if you have two 250gig drives in a raid array, your computer only sees the 250gigs of info, but should one drive fail, the other has identical info on it.