Author Topic: Somehow lost about 40 gigs of music... anyone have any advice? (Read 6136 times)

Tim · « **on:** February 27, 2005, 09:02:27 PM »

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 · « **Reply #1 on:** February 27, 2005, 09:07:48 PM »

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 · « **Reply #2 on:** February 27, 2005, 09:09:41 PM »

Quote from: BC on February 27, 2005, 09:07:48 PM

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 · « **Reply #3 on:** February 27, 2005, 10:48:46 PM »

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

Tim · « **Reply #4 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:05:37 AM »

Quote from: BC on February 27, 2005, 10:48:46 PM

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 · « **Reply #5 on:** February 28, 2005, 09:15:17 AM »

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 · « **Reply #6 on:** February 28, 2005, 09:23:37 AM »

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 · « **Reply #7 on:** February 28, 2005, 10:14:07 AM »

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. · « **Reply #8 on:** February 28, 2005, 10:34:21 AM »

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 · « **Reply #9 on:** February 28, 2005, 11:36:03 AM »

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 · « **Reply #10 on:** February 28, 2005, 11:49:28 AM »

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 11:36:03 AM

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 · « **Reply #11 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:04:10 PM »

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

kindms · « **Reply #12 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:24:01 PM »

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 · « **Reply #13 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:40:18 PM »

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

Scooter · « **Reply #14 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:47:57 PM »

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.

mmedley. · « **Reply #15 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:48:55 PM »

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 12:40:18 PM

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

There are many types of RAID configs, but essentially you use a second harddrive as a 'mirror' in case of failure of one of the drives you have an exact copy of it.

http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html

Tim · « **Reply #16 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:50:14 PM »

so say I have dirve 1 and drive 2, with drive 1 mirrored on drive 2, can I store anything on drive 2 or is it reserved just to mirror drive 1?

taktheride · « **Reply #17 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:51:13 PM »

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 12:40:18 PM

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

Check this out:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

ethan · « **Reply #18 on:** February 28, 2005, 12:53:57 PM »

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 12:50:14 PM

so say I have dirve 1 and drive 2, with drive 1 mirrored on drive 2, can I store anything on drive 2 or is it reserved just to mirror drive 1?

Just a mirror of drive 1...so basicly you give up half your space for the guarentee that if one drive goes bad you still have your data.

-e

dnsacks · « **Reply #19 on:** February 28, 2005, 01:49:00 PM »

anybody aware of a raid solution (software or hardware) available for drives mounted as usb2 external drives?

ethan · « **Reply #20 on:** February 28, 2005, 01:57:59 PM »

I know linux has several software RAID implementations but I'm not aware of solutions for other OS's

-e

Brian Skalinder · « **Reply #21 on:** February 28, 2005, 02:09:32 PM »

Quote from: ethan on February 28, 2005, 01:57:59 PM

I know linux has several software RAID implementations but I'm not aware of solutions for other OS's

Windoze has supported software-implemented RAID since NT 4.0, I think. No idea if it'll work on USB drives, though, but I don't see why not.

dnsacks · « **Reply #22 on:** February 28, 2005, 02:47:10 PM »

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sag_diskconcepts_17.mspx

looks like you need to be running a true server os (i.e. not xp pro or lower) to be able to mirror volumes under windoze.

Thanks for the throught tho

Tim · « **Reply #23 on:** February 28, 2005, 02:57:32 PM »

Quote from: ethan on February 28, 2005, 12:53:57 PM

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 12:50:14 PM
so say I have dirve 1 and drive 2, with drive 1 mirrored on drive 2, can I store anything on drive 2 or is it reserved just to mirror drive 1?

Just a mirror of drive 1...so basicly you give up half your space for the guarentee that if one drive goes bad you still have your data.

-e

that's what I thought, doesn't interest me in the least then...

dnsacks · « **Reply #24 on:** February 28, 2005, 03:06:07 PM »

Quote from: Tim on February 28, 2005, 02:57:32 PM

that's what I thought, doesn't interest me in the least then...

Tim:

Why not? To me, this seems a hell of a lot easier to set up and maintain than a single drive backed up to dvd disks (~62 dvd disks per 250gb drive), but would provide pretty much identical protection were a hard drive to fail (simply slap in a second and let the system "re-raid" it for you). Only real way to have a catastrophic failure on a raid array like this would be for both the drives to fail at the exact same time.

Tim · « **Reply #25 on:** February 28, 2005, 03:25:38 PM »

it's cost prohibitve at the moment and I don't run a desktop anymore. I didn't mean to be completely dismissive, in a few years when I have the space it will certainly be more enticing.

taktheride · « **Reply #26 on:** February 28, 2005, 04:40:50 PM »

Quote from: dnsacks on February 28, 2005, 01:49:00 PM

anybody aware of a raid solution (software or hardware) available for drives mounted as usb2 external drives?

People have raided ipod shuffles, so I bet it'd work with usb2 drives, assuming all things are the same.