External HDD converted to RAW, lost 50,000 songs

[tinana]

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.

[Peke]

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

[Scooter]

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.

[tinana]

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.

(gold- recently upgraded to lifetime-member)

[rotoloben]

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.