As posted by jozeph78 in another forum, the problem is simpler.
I report his post:

"Essentially, this was a file permissions issue. Because Simple File
Sharing was enabled, I did not see the security tab and could not take
ownership of the drives. I don't know why it would lie about the file
system though. I could easily see the file system type in disk manager
and any recovery tool would have let me copy the files. Pretty weak if
you ask me. Thank god I didn't waste more than a day on this fudge."

The Simple File Sharing option can be disabled as follows:

Control Panel -> Folder Options -> View Tab
Under Advanced options, the last is Use Simple File Sharing
Disable it and the drive will be again visible with all its contents.

Best regards.

Well, actually, the reason I wasn't *that* upset initially, as someone above noted, is that I actually do have everything backed up, but to DVD, in .rar format. Of course, I wasn't looking forward to having to uncompress and re-tag everything, and the thought of having to do that made me realize that while it's nice to have back-ups in any form, having only DVD's is really (!) impractical.

Again, thanks for all the suggestions and well-wishes...I really do like and appreciate the MM community. :D

(gold- recently upgraded to lifetime-member) :D

Congrats.

Now make a back up.

After you make a back up, make a second back up.

I have 25k on 1tb with a 1tb backup (backed up 3-4x a week) and then another 1tb archive which is backed up about once a month.

I think you are very lucky to have so much invested on a single stupid drive without a back up. But you didn't need me to say that--you know that now.

I can say this in name of all of those people that we are very very happy that you have reclaimed your files back.

Edit by MM community: .... and we love you too 8) :lol: :wink: :roll:

I was finally able to recover the entire contents of my drive first using the trial version of recovermyfiles to verify that my files were both intact and identifiable...they were, and I'd like to add that the "identifiable" part was veeeery important considering the number of music files that were affected...and then ponying up the 60bux for the full version in order to retrieve them.

Apparently the mft on my external HDD became corrupt and most of the software solutions mentioned above either failed to find more than a fraction of my files or when they did find everything, listed found files minus the names--I had 50,000 mp3's stripped of tags.

Recovermyfiles reconstructed my mft and so all of my problems were solved within minutes. Nonetheless, thanks to all who offered helpful suggestions...it's what I love about MM and this forum.

Using testdisk I'm finally able to see the data on my disk and it's all there, as I hoped...and suspected...all along. Thanks again to all.

Luckily, I had just bought a an external 500gig HDD so I can copy my files over to it in order to reformat the old drive.

What's got me concerned is I don't know why this happened in the first place and until I find out I can't prevent it from happening again.

Thanks technojnky, I had delayed write errors with the first drive before it failed and now I'm having the same problem with the second, both Seagate externals. I'll check your tips out.

It seems that usb/firewire drives have a tendency to fail.

My first external drive experience was harrowing.

I bought a generic usb/firewire hardrive box at the local compusa etc, a 300 gig maxtor and a week later it was failing with delayed write failures.

It turns out that alot of generic usb/firewire chips don't have very good support for large hard drives.

This leads to delayed write and partition failures.

It's quite a wide spread problem.

I've since moved to only using external drives that have enclosures from their manufacturer and I haven't had any problems since. (meaning buying an external drive with name brand western digital, seagate, etc)

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&safe=off&q=delayed+write+failure

I have had luck with a couple programs that can restore partitions and/or deleted files.

[url=http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk]Testdisk[/url] is free and has recovered failed/deleted partitions for me before.

http://www.partitionsupport.com/utilities.htm

[url=http://www.active-undelete.com/]active undelete[/url] works, but its not free, and it works on file recovery basis not necessarily restoring a whole partition

some other useful links
http://www.geocities.com/thestarman3/asm/mbr/MBR_in_detail.htm
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1139&page=6

That is not coincidence! Two HDDs on same PC.

Before you try anything to fix get them out from USB Ext Box and connect them to PC Directly (If you can) to see if they act same. That will narrow the problem.

Thanks for the info, Peke. I'm looking at that software now. Also, it looks like another external HDD is going bad: my other 50,000 tracks. Now I'm wondering if there's a problem with my USB or Windows XP.

Have you tried some of [url=http://www.acronis.com/]Acronis[/url] tools. I find them great and maybe in Trial you can fix the problem.

Thanks everyone for the information. The Seagate disk diagnostic utility suggests there aren't any physical problems with the disk, so I think my file system got corrupted somehow, probably after not properly disconnecting the usb HDD via the taskbar.

Gege, hi, and thanks for the tip (most of those tracks I lost are from 50's and 60's brazilian artists! ;^D ), but I tried both Getbackdata for NTFS and FAT but neither can see or recognize the drive, I imagine because it's now in RAW format. How did you make this work? :oops:

[quote="Anonymous"][quote="alanl"]This also happened to me.

Read all of this message before trying anything, and anything you try is at your own risk. [b]YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.[/b]

Try running CHKDSK. I picked this up somewhere:

Edit: Try gege's suggestion first.[/quote]

CHKDSK should be the *last* thing to be done!

If the data is really important to you, buy a new drive and make an exact copy of the damaged drive. Invest in decent software that can do this. Chances are, the software will also have tools that can fix the problem (on the clone first!).[/quote]

This is absolutely right! The more you try to 'fix' the disk, the more it is likely to be unrecoverable.
A good recovery software just *reads* the disk. Not a single bit is written to it during the recovery process. This the safest thing to do if you want to preserve your precious files!

[quote="alanl"]This also happened to me.

Read all of this message before trying anything, and anything you try is at your own risk. [b]YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.[/b]

Try running CHKDSK. I picked this up somewhere:

Edit: Try gege's suggestion first.[/quote]

CHKDSK should be the *last* thing to be done!

If the data is really important to you, buy a new drive and make an exact copy of the damaged drive. Invest in decent software that can do this. Chances are, the software will also have tools that can fix the problem (on the clone first!).

If Your File system Was FAT32 on EXT HDD, someone that know what is doing can bring it back using Norton Diskeditor (2004 version I think was last that can work in DOS), Win98SE Boot disk and DOS Prompt. Have made that >40 fixes that way.
FAT32 can be accessed when and how you like, most unsecured and easy to fix File System.