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[rumba101]

Hello people.  Perhaps some of you MC12 power users can give me a hand.

One of my external hard drives failed recently, let's call it the I drive.  On that drive, I had several gigs worth of music that I had collected over the years.  Fortunately, I had the music backed-up on another external drive (let's call it the J drive) that I don't keep permanently connected.  I'll copy and paste the backed up music on the J drive into a third drive so MC12 can "recognize" it and import it.  Now my question is, will MC12 recognize that these are copies of songs that were on the failed drive and will MC12 retain the ratings tags of the songs.  Man, it sure would be a pain in the butt if I had to re-rate all those songs that were lost on the I drive.

Any help is much appreciated.

Piero

[KingSparta]

I'll copy and paste the backed up music on the J drive into a third drive so MC12 can "recognize" it and import it.

Why Go Thru All Of That, Why Don't you Just Go To

"Start"
"Control Panel"
"Administrative Tools"
"Computer Management"
"Storage"
"Disk Management"
Click On Your "J" Drive
Right Click
Select Change Drive Letter And path
And Change "J" Drive To "I"

It only takes like 30 seconds

[Alex B]

KingSparta's advice is good. If some other drive has already reserved the I letter you must first change that to something else or disconnect the drive.

However, you may want to back up the drive anyway before doing anything else.

Also, it might be a good idea to create a manual backup file of the library before proceeding. (File > Library > Back Up Library...) MC creates automatic backup files, but these may not contain the very recent changes.

In addition you may want to disable "Auto-Import" or at least its "Fix broken links" and "Update for external changes" options to make sure that MC does not automatically remove the possibly unavailable files or replace library data with outdated data from the file tags (unless your backup copy is really an exact duplicate of the last original file structure).

This search should be able to find all missing files: [=IsMissing([Filename])]=1

If you have a few offline files after connecting the drive you can try to manually fix the "Filename (path)", "Filename (name)" or "Filename" library fields (the last one contains the complete filename including the path).

After all files are available again you can use the "Update Tags (from library)" tool for updating the file tags.

[rjm]

Just in case your backup is not up to date and you want to recover data off of your failed drive...

I recommend SpinRite from grc.com. This utility has a very good track record of repairing failed drives.

[rumba101]

Nice responses.  Let me try some of those options and see if I can make it work. 

In the meantime, thanks so much for your help!

Piero