[Trequaife]

I am having trouble accessing mp3 files. if I do a search on my hard drive I pull up 15 gigs but that pathway does not exist and if I try to play it from that search on my hard drive it will show the song as being 00:00 in length. I have tried going into my registry and confirming my music pathway exist and it does. Would it be to assume that some how this are corrupted as well and just do data recovery on my hard drive.

I had a extral hard drive that I backed up over 300 gigs of music well after 3 weeks of use it died.

Thanks

[Rollin' Rog]

What is the pathway? And what is the parent folder most of these were in? You can try right clicking on the parent folder and selecting Properties > Previous versions and see if anything relevant turns up there.

Open a command prompt (start > run: cmd) and enter:

fsutil dirty query c:

This assumes that 'c' is the drive these are on.

Does it report "dirty" or "not dirty"?

Have you run chkdsk on the drive lately?

[Trequaife]

I have the program "Active undelete" it states that my drive is healthy, I already ran check disk and its all good. Under properties the pathway shows up as "c:\users\tim quaife\music\Music\" but I cannot open that location (please attachment). If you notice it states the size of the file on search but upon opening properties up the file size then states 0 bytes. I am at a total loss, my on my 3 week old external drive I lost 300 gigs of mp3's I don't want to have anymore problems

[Trequaife]

Sorry here is the attachment I was speaking of

[Rollin' Rog]

Open Windows Explorer, and starting at your User Name -- manually proceed down that path one directory at a time.

Where does it dead end?

Right click on the last directory you can open and select Properties > Previous Versions.

Anything there, under "previous versions"?

If all the file sizes in the last directory are '0' and the directory itself is no greater than its sum -- then those files are likely the remnants of some drive corruption which affected the whole folder.

[Trequaife]

Thanks

The pathway only leads up to c:\users\tim quaife\music; I am missing one more folder, the pathway I am looking for should go as following

c:\users\tim quaife\music\Music\


I am going to see if I can recover any files using "active undelete"

Please see attachment

[Rollin' Rog]

So in right clicking on that available "Music" directory and selecting "Properties > Previous Versions" there was nothing there?

Was chkdsk run on the drive BEFORE this happened?

If so, go to Folder Options > View and temporarily uncheck "Hide Protected Operating System Files".

Then open the "root" directory (c:) and see if any folders appear named "Found.nnn" where 'nnn' is a number.

These are recovered chkdsk files.

[Trequaife]

Thanks again

But I could not find anything. This maybe a stupid question then but when I move one of the those MP3 files to my desktop it changes into a file folder with 0 as the file size. I just installed my itunes again and its pulling up all my mp3 even the ones that were on my external drive, I think I know what is going on here. All those mp3 must be just a file generated for from my old music library (like a over view of my collection). Does this make sense then

[Rollin' Rog]

So the mp3's are there -- they are just getting loaded into Itunes?

I'm not familiar with it so I can't really help you there, but I imagine there would be a configuration option in it someplace that would determine how this is handled -- whether automatically or manually.