Well hopefully there are some pc tech people on here that may help.
Yesterday I turned my pc on but it would not boot up into windows. Tried a couple of time and nothing, just kept freezing on the splash screen. Went into the bios and noticed it was only seeing one of my hard drives, mmmm strange. Opened the pc up and removed the sata cable and plugged it back in (pc switched off ) PC then booted up into windows but before it did a message appeared saying drive d: had errors and it automatically ran chkdsk. When I finally got onto windows I went and checked out the hard drive. :eek: no music, all gone apart from one folder which has crap on it. Now the hard drive is 250gb with a usable 238gb or so. Its saying 130gb free which should mean 100gb is taken up? Wrong. I can only find 40gb of files, the remaining 60gb was my music.
My question is why can’t I find the folder of music and why is it showing as taking up space on this hard drive if its not visible. Any software I can use to extract or find it.
Sorry for the long story. Any help would be appreciated.
I believe a LiveCD (Linux thing) can mount NTFS. You will need to learn a few commands (one of them NOT being delete since there’s no undelete) but you can get a raw look at your drive w/o Windows cocking it up.
Good advice, but be advised that not all hard drive controllers play nice with each other, so if you put the hard drive in another computer, even as a slave, you could blue screen or see nothing at all. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. Don’t freak out if it does, it’s just a different hard drive controller.
One thing I’ve done before was put in a Knoppix CD and I was able to see some files that my PC said were not there. It’s a Linux OS that runs form the CD so you don’t have to install anything. Not sure if it’ll work or if I’me even remembering things right, but if all else fails you might try that.
I had my external harddrive become unreadable one day a little more than a year ago. My second computer could not read it either. First I tried recovery software and stuff like Spinrite but neither of that played nice with my harddive. So just as a random idea I put a Ubuntu LiveCD in and that thing could actually read my harddive. So I coped everything off to another hardrive and then formatted my external drive and it’s been working nicely ever since.
I do keep two copies of my stuff nowadays, I’d rather not have it happen to me again and it being unsolvable that time.
I suspect that that I was using the leaked Windows 7 release candidate (about a week before it went public) might have been a contributing factor.
Thanks very much guys for the quick responses very much appreciated. I will try some of these options out tonight when I get home.
I did forget to mention I have a back up of most of my music but only up until the beginning of July so at the very least I’ll loose a months worth of music, but suppose I could contact the sites where I’ve purchased and ask to re-download.
I didn’t want to transfer the files over until I resolved the situation with the missing files/folders first and the hope its not going to do it again.
To stop this kind of thing occuring, I use a freeware windows program called Syncback. With this I backup weekly to an external harddrive and also via ftp to the unlimited webspace I get with my website.
So even if a fire or thief trashes all my hardware, the tunes should be accessible from anywhere.
Probably a good topic for a DJTT article, to be honest.
I just backup all of my music to my home pc as soon as i get it. Now those copys don’t have my key data, cue points and grids stored, but i think i’m going to take care of that right now. Thanks djtt’s.
managed to scan and recover an entire FORMATTED partition on a drive that my computer couldn’t even READ (just said “bad drive”). Fucking amazing piece of software.
I tried other programs before this one, some just caught some of the files and some didn’t even see the drive. But that program… man. I’m not even worried about HDD crashes anymore.
This is the same as the LiveCD I mentioned. Does Knoppix automatically mount? It’s not the most noob-friendly thing, but desperate times call for desperate measures.
) PC then booted up into windows but before it did a message appeared saying drive d: had errors and it automatically ran chkdsk. When I finally got onto windows I went and checked out the hard drive. :eek: no music, all gone apart from one folder which has crap on it. Now the hard drive is 250gb with a usable 238gb or so. Its saying 130gb free which should mean 100gb is taken up? Wrong. I can only find 40gb of files, the remaining 60gb was my music.