The case of the missing music

[panzerschreck]

Hey guys,

I was organzing my mp3's into folders. I did it by band name then album name, I have a folder named Industrial Music A-M which is where I put all the A-M bands. So I got them all organized and I cut the folders and pasted them in there. Some of them were duplicates so I said no to not overwrite them. Everything seems dandy. I go to check on them and only some showed up(A's, B's and C's), AHHHH! Then I look further down the list, every folder that I had in there previously from letters D-M(including all the ones I have just pasteD) have also dissapeared. I don't know where they went, they didn't go into another folder or anything. My harddrive hasn't lost space so they haven't been deleted. Now when I go into the folder my computer lags and sometimes freezes up. So the solution to freezing is just simply restart my computer but once I restart it, it gets to the screen with Windows displayed on it and it has the 3 or 4 squares running across and then my computer restarts itself and this can go in for 5 6 sometimes 7 times before it actually starts up. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP! Any required information that could help just please let me know if I have forgotten it.

Specs
CPU : 1.7ghz
GC : Radeon 9200 PCI
SC : Onboard intel crap
HD : 80g internal, 200g external(this is where the files are stored on the 200g one)
Memory : 1022mb

 

[mikescorpio81]

Sounds like your HDD is on the brink of collapse!

Once you finally boot into Windows (Safe mode even), have you tried searching your HDD for *.mp3 or *.wma or whatever?
If your HDD is still showing the original disk size then chances are they are somewhere. Possibly written to bad sectors though.

You haven't enable System Restore have you? If so, roll back to a day you know everything was fine. If not ... remember it when you re-build next time!

Good luck! :grinthumb

 

[panzerschreck]

Yes, I have tried searching for the files and nothing comes up.

Everytime I do system restore it gives me some sort of error saying that it couldn't do it.

EDIT : GOT IT WORKING =D! When I did a system restore, all it listed for the days to restore it to was a "restore point" or something like that, I found one that said Distribution Software 2.0 and restore it to that date. Everything is back in it's original folders and now I am just going to rename them and leave them in that folder!

EDIT 2 : Nevermind, all the stuff from D-M is still missing, same amount of space on my computer as before, tried multiple system restores and nothing happened.

 

[mikescorpio81]

System restore only restores drivers and registry settings. It is useful though, if by some chance your PC was corrupted somehow it reverts it back to a working stage. It doesn't restore deleted data though ... but because your HDD is still showing the correct amount of data I thought it might sort you out!

In any case, usually what I do to retreive data is one of two things:

1. Obtain a GUI boot disk of sorts and boot from it. A good one is Mini XPE, its kind of like an OS on CD. You can interrogate your HDD from there and even copy.

2. After taking out the HDD, obtain a USB to IDE adatper or put it into another PC. Try and copy data from it.

You should also (if you haven't yet) run a chkdsk on the HDD.

 

[panzerschreck]

Ok I am having a panic attack right now. I was organzing my files, I figure I would just re-burn the cd's from d-m to my computer. Now I was organzing folders, and this other folder was locking stuff up on my 200gb harddrive, I had to restart multiple times. So now I put them into a folder and it locks up so I end up restarting again. NOW MY DRIVE IS COMPLETELY GONE! My computer folder doesn't show it as being there. So I try a system restore and I get this message :

"Changes made to the drive(s) H:\ after this point cannot be reversed because the drive was either excluded from System Restore monitoring, or was turned off or removed."

I didn't do ANYTHING! This is driving me nuts and I am going insane. Please someone help!

 

[fish4specs]

Make sure your drive "H:\" is the same letter assigned to the drive when restore point made. Include any internal and/or removable drives that may have been included in restore point you are trying to use. got that message one time and USB drive had been reassigned a different drive letter --brief panic--. Drive letters can be changed in Administative tools.

 

[mikescorpio81]

At this point it sounds like your HDD is dead or seriously close to dead! Is it making any strange clunking noises?

Take the HDD out and try it in another PC (jumper settings to slave or cable select). Try and retrieve as much data as you can or go with my boot cd option. The more you try and salvage or make changes to it at this point, the more problems you will encounter.

Check in Computer Management (Right-Click My Computer - MANAGE) under Disk Management to see if Windows recognises the HDD. Remount it if you can, but as i said the more you try and fix this dying HDD the more problems you will encounter!

Grab the data off & run! :grinthumb