OK, last night we had a power outage, when the power comes back on my computer doesn't boot. After troubleshooting it turns out to be my main mp3 disk! Somehow along the way it was converted to a dynamic disk and due to the power outage it has somehow been corrupted. I have no doubts that I can salvage the disk with a low level format... but I'd really like to salvage the data as well. Any ideas?

*shugs* but i feel for you. i had the same thing happen 80gbs of mp3s POOF! gone in one surge.

I had a similar thing happen to me a few years ago. I used PowerQuest's Lost & Found (now discontinued) and was able to restore a good 99% of my data. I didn’t do much research, but I'm sure there are other programs like Lost & Found that work just as well, and aren't too expensive. I think I paid $40 for it back then. Anyway, do yourself a favor and buy a UPS. A decent one will cost you just a little more than the recovery software, but will save you from the headaches and data loss down the road.


Edited to remove words left in the last sentence from a previous version of it. Don't you hate it when that happens?

Does this help?

Dynamic Disks are Satan's Work. That being said, the following is lifted from a post in M$.public.win2000.file_system:

This may be caused by a renumbering of the drive partitions resulting in the original boot.ini settings being incorrect.
In the case I had, a small 8 MB partition at the end of the drive had been renumbered to partition 1. This caused the
boot partition to be renumbered to partition #2

If you cannot access the system, you must create a new boot.ini with the new settings and copy this to the boot
partition using recovery console.

1. In recovery console, use TYPE BOOT.INI to view the current Boot.ini file.
2. On another computer, create a text file to match using notepad except increase the partition number by 1 and copy
this to the root of the boot partition.
3. Restart the computer.


End quote.

Just something to poke around (carefully damnit!) with before writing it off. Don't goof up your working disks tho!

-Zeke

well heres the dealio.... the drive in question is a slave... the machine won't even boot into an OS with it attached... I can't even run recovery console. So I got my hands on R-studio, used some disk utilities to boot and see the damaged/corrupted drive, deleted the partition careful not to format, after that the OS booted up fine. I'm using R-studio now to go back in and recover the data, I had it scanning last night, it found 81 directory entries and then seemed to stop (cyclic redundency error?) anyway... I'm hoping to recover a little, but it's not looking good.

Anyway, do yourself a favor and buy a UPS. A decent one will cost you just a little more than the recovery software, but will save you from the headaches and data loss down the road

I've been meaning to get one for a while - just found an APC Smart UPS 1400 on ebay (new batteries, wouldn't buy a used one) for a good price. I've put a watch on it...

Gareth

Yep, that sounds pretty bad. I hadn't seen R-Studio before, it looks interesting.

The only reason I use Dynamic Disks at all is on a low-rent W2K server box w/o hardware RAID. I use it to mirror & RAID 5 on some old 4 & 8 GB SCSI drives. I know DD gives Powerquest products heartburn, even their server products. It was hard finding anyone with good things to say about it when looking for that little tidbit.

Good thing you have an empeg with (hopefully all!) your music on it. I know how you feel. I corrupted a few hundred mp3's in a misguided overclocking attempt about 6 years ago, no empeg to save me then. I renamed a lot of .chk files by hand. Ugh.

-Zeke

Good thing you have an empeg with (hopefully all!) your music on it.

I do have all my music on the empeg, unfortunately I'd just spent the last 3 weeks, getting all my tag info correct and with tag and rename downloaded all the album covers and album info into text files.

Now... heres an issue with pulling the files down from empeg, for some strange reason a lot of my music has a little rectangle character in the filename, these files freak out the download feature in jemplode, so basically when I download these the don't have a file extension.... which would be OK for a couple of files here and there.... but I have a feeling A LOT of my music is like this. I don't really know why they are like that or how they got that way, does anyone have a quick fix for that?

copy all the extensionless files to a separate folder(i.e. c:\badmp3).
Open a command prompt window.
go to that folder:
c:
cd\badmp3
then type:
ren *. *.mp3

That should rename all files with no extension to the same name with the mp3 extension. I don't think you will lose the long file names but just in case make sure you copy the extensionless files instead of moving them. If it all check out, delete the original extensionless files and copy the newly extensioned files to the folder where they came from.

Hope this helps.

Rene

(already thought of that) I could do that, but I'm guessing that I have probably around 100 or so albums that the id3 tags are screwed up on (I have over 40 gigs of mp3's here). I'd rather not have to manipulate that many seperate folders. I was hoping there would be a way to run something on the empeg that would clear all those rectangular characters out of all the id3 tags.....