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[bobe4]

Hey all,

Ive been a MC user since MC7 (using 12 now)... but I'm in desperate circumstances and need some senior MC users to school me...

My sad story:
My hard drive crashed (as I was making a backup)... So until I can afford the $1000 for data recovery, I have gone back and salvaged a half version of my library.

Problem:
6000 of my song are in MC twice (one set shows "file missing" and has all my hours of tagging in the fields; the second set shows it is connected to an actual file, but it is missing much of the tagging info).

So I want to get all the tagging info of the 6000 missing links, into the 6000 links pointing to the actual music files.

Note:
With the broken links, it isn't one simple change to file path... each album has it's own unique difference in the file path... all that to say, I can simply do one find and replace.

I put hours into tagging the (now broken links)...

------

Also, anyone know a cheap hard drive recovery place (or a seller of hard drive PCB's)?  (Even with this I'm still missing 5000 songs and tons of family pics... so eventually i need to get the hard drive recovered... it appears to just be a bad PCB but I have not been able to match the firmware on drives i've found).

thanks,

Bob

[drc]

As for the disk recovery, I don't have the exact location...I had a similar problem and went on line and search for disk recovery tool (again I can't remember the name of it) it did find my old records and recovered everything.

Hopefully it helps a little.  The software was easy to use.

[rjm]

There is a high probablity that SpinRite from grc.com will fix your hard drive.

[Mastiff]

You may try File Scavenger as well. It has saved my butt on more than one occasion! Good luck!

Edit: This is why I have an exact duplicate of everything on separate hard drives not connected to the same computer and only do updates over the network with the network shares of the original files as read only. That way nothing can go wrong. I hope... 

[hit_ny]

No software tools will work with a busted  PCB on the unit !

..if that is indeed the problem.

How bout you rest the drive for say a day or two and try to connect it back up.

[KingSparta]

I was reading an article last night, and it is not recommended changing the PCB on larger drives unless everything matches the old pcb.

[bob]

It's very rarely a bad PCB, it's usually a platter crash and the PCB won't spin the drive up because of the crash or it will spin it up and right back down again, or it will spin it up but you are missing a bunch of stuff. You could try the manufacturers test utility. Nearly all of them have DOS based bootable test disks or CD's.

If it really IS the pcb, sometimes with components that are failing because of heat, you can put the drive in the freezer for a while then hook it up and try to recover stuff off of it OR look for a hot chip on the PCB and put one of those little stick-on heatsinks on it to drop the temp a couple of degrees, sometimes that's all you need...

[Mastiff]

Exactly. The PCB will be damaged almost exclusively if you have managed to try to put a live hard disk power cable into it the wrong way! Yes, I have done it... Anyway, a damage to the PCB is a lot (by a lot I mean with a factor of probably 1000, at least) less likely than physical damage inside, because a reading head has crashed into the platter.

[bobe4]

Wow... thanks for replying ... here are some more details

Failed HD:
Seagate 400GB Ultra ATA drive - ST3400620A FIRMWARE 3.AAD

What actually happped:
I bought two external NAS enclosures, wiped my back up drive and was about to rerun a fresh backup to the newly formatted backup drive when the external enclosure holding the original data started to smell of burning electronics... quickly turned off... but too late, it jacked up my original data drive... right after i wiped the backup drive to do a fresh backup!  I put a second drive in the enclosure (a cheap small drive) just as a test and it fried it as well.  So...

What I've tried:
1. I tried some recovery programs, and giving it a rest to ensure it's cool, but can't get it to spin up at all with it's pcb
2. bought duplicate hard drive with firmware slightly different (crashed is firmware 3.AAD, duplicate drive is 3.AAE), and drive spins up but wont mount in windows.

Any ideas?

Maybe I can put an add on craigslist and pay someone with more expertise than me to try and trouble shoot it.  it's actually been dead for 6 months and i was bit too depressed to deal with it after a few weeks...

[Mastiff]

OK, that souds like wrong power going to the wrong place, which is exactly what may damage a PCB. If you can't mount it with the new PCB I suggest you try File Scavenger, which doesn't need to have the drive mounted to work. As long as it can see the drive, it will work. With any luck it's just the "map" to your files that's damaged, not the actual files themselves.

[Doof]

Any chance that rather than recover data from the damaged drive, you could recover the data on the backup drive? It's generally easier to retrieve deleted data off a good drive than anything off a damaged drive.

[Mastiff]

Good point, Doof. That should also work with File Scavenger.

[hit_ny]

or recuva

provided you have not overwritten the backup drive

[bobe4]

These are some great comments.  I'm downloading file scavenger now... hopefully it will work on the original drive.

For the backup drive, I had reformated the back up drive just before this all happened (not a quick format), would that wipe all data?
I may have written new data to the drive too (I got so down after messing with it for a month that I havn't looked at it in the last six months or so... I'll dig around and see).

I'll let you know.

[Doof]

I would definitely try running a file recovery on the backup drive. Even though you formatted it, you'll mostly likely be able to recover data from it. Your chances would have been better if you hadn't put written anything else onto it, but even so, you might be surprised what you can recover from it. I've run file recovery software on drives and had it find files that had been gone for years. But as always, YMMV.

[bobe4]

We'll here is the results... drum roll please

- No success with Original drive... programs cant see it due to the pcb replacement having the wrong firmware

- Backup drive that was reformatted and latter loaded with work files, has been shipped across country to person working on a project... so can't look at that now... but I'll get the drive back in a month and run programs then.

- Found another drive... that would not mount a year ago, but mounted today, praise God, and had backups of all the files a few months before the crash (so I got 93-95% of the files and tagging work recovered...).  It was weird, this drive did nothing for me before, but now it just worked perfectly (connected to a new computer).  Finished transfering to new HD and making new backup... hurray.

I hope to still one-day find the right PCB for the fried hard drive... but I can definitely live with this!.

Thanks for all the comments, and perhaps when the reformatted hard drive comes back I'll be able to get some data off of it!

Thanks,

Bob

[tombert]

My question: The file path of the original and the lost file is different, but what about the file name itself? If they are tagged correctly (meaning name, artist and album) the path should not matter no more. Unfort. I haven't written any scripts in MC (and do not know its capabilites so far) but maybe someone else could help out?

Another idea: Create a new library and use "Rename files from properties" to make the new library look like your old one (it moves and renames files to different locations) - then simply switch back to your old one.

tom