Hi jgt1942,
Wow, you are a very safe data management guy indeed! I did berate myself and wished I had...........however, I felt confident I could recover my music and put it down to a rather tedious learning experience.
My drive is dead as a doornail. I tried freezing it / fixing it etc. After weeks of trying things (it was some time ago now) I ditched it and focused on my other drives that once held my library. I tried several incredibly lengthy attempts with recovery apps i.e. ease us/wondershare/stellar phoenix/data rescue/disk drill/r-studio. Eventually found in this case r-studio recovered the tracks most effectively. So now I have probably got all my tracks and many more and the recovery was not organised i.e. all mp3/aac/flac etc were recovered but not in the original file structure(or any structure actually) I was just pleased to get them and set it aside for a time when I could get round to reorganising them all. I've had some unexpected circumstances recently which I have had to deal with hence no progress has been made yet - can't wait to get it done though. So now I have my original library data i.e. mmdb file and a ton of music on a new drive in one folder. I got advice from a previous post from lowlander who reckons I could use the locate missing files option which I really hope works to repopulate the music as then I could see the missing files if any. I did try the auto organise, but it gave me tons more folders than I originally had with only one song etc and was a bit messy. I may still have to go that way again and trudge through it, but I'm excited to try the find missing files option. As soon as I have time, I'll give it a try and post my outcome.
Thanks for your comprehensive reply jgt1942. I really appreciate it.

Can anyone please tell me why I am not able to post a PM - the message is denied stating it is flagged as spam.

thanks

inversneck how goes your recovery? I imagine you have berated yourself numerous times about not creating a backup, sometimes we know better but for various reason we just don't act. I go to extremes to hopefully provide good backups. I currently have about 11.5 TB of system and data and have about 33 TB allocated locally for backups of which about 28 TB is used. I primarily use three applications to protect myself.
1) Hard Disk Sentinel - This application calculates the health of a drive and predicts the remaining life of the drive in days. You can establish warning levels for various things like days less than 100, temp greater than 120 degrees, etc. This app has saved me numerous times from the dreaded drive failure such as you encountered.
2) I backup my "data" to two different sets of drives, thus I have a level 1 and a level 2. Yep this this take a lot of drive space
3) I run nightly system (the OS portion) incremental backup and every 7 days I create a full backup. I keep 5 sets. Yep this is a lot of drive space.
So far I have been able to recover from data failures and hopefully this will remain a true statement. If you needs some detail suggestions feel free to send me a PM and include your contact info.

Would it be correct to assume that you cannot see anything on your failed drive? If this is the case your options are rather limited. You might try putting the drive in a ziplock bag, put it in your freezer for a couple of days, remove it from the freezer, immediately connect it to your PC and see if you can access the drive. This is along shot and has worked for some people. If you can access the drive you have a very limited time to recover from the disk and it may be necessary to repeat this procedure several times. Hopefully you have a USB-3 or better yet a USB-C connections. My music library is 525 GB and it would take a LONG time to copy it via USB-2. I only tried this option one time and it did not work for me but I have seen postings where people have reported success.

If the freezer option does not produce good results you can go the route of sending the drive to somebody that can open the drive and recover through special procedures. This route is very expensive, I've never gone this route.

If you can access the drive there are other possible options. Let me know, I'll have to dig through my notes.

Thank you for your reply. I must have been mistaken in the use of "locate moved / missing files function. Thats great that it can work. I will attempt it soon and see how it goes.
Thanks again for taking the time out to help.

The biggest problem you face is that the files don't have the same folder structure. You can use File > Locate Moved/Missing Files, but I suggest to verify each match to make sure it is correct.

Hi,
I've been usingMM for many years now. I slowly over the years manually, perfectly organised to my liking my 500gb music collection mainly via manually labeled genre/artist/album. Well, my external HDD catastrophically failed on me a few weeks ago and stupidly, I didn't have it backed up. I could not access this HDD with a file recovery program. I did have another older HDD which I used to have my collection (amongst many other things) on it at one time. I managed to use a file recovery program to access and recover all the mp3 tracks that had ever been on the drive, however they are not in folders and there are an extra 250 GB of mp3 tracks i.e. 750GB in total as opposed to my 500GB Library that was in existence. I backed up my MM db and ini files of my original library before attempting anything. My objective is to best utilise MM to restore my original library back into existence. With such a task in hand and after looking through the forum and trying several things, I finally tried what I was afraid of (Im old fashioned I guess)- Auto organising my files which worked to a point (I backed up my collection prior to auto organising just in case). I seem to have a fair bit of organising left to do to check if all the songs are all there. Before I go any further down this route I am asking if any of you expert users could inform me if I'm going about this in the most efficient way. I believe the find missing files option won't work according to the forum posts, which would have repopulated my database and shown me which files were still missing afterwards. Any guidance on the situation would be greatefully received.