Trust Windows to **** up your Mp3 player

Hydrosylator

I have an mp3player/recorder with 20gb of space. I use it for music and as an external hard drive for my college work, I'm a multimedia student, digital stills and other stuff. I really love the thing, as much as a piece of hardware can be loved anyway.

Now in college, they have both Windows 2000 and XP. At home, I have 98. They all quite happily run with my device.Custom was, I'd plug in my device to the usb, and it would appear in "My Computer" as F: Jukebox or whatever letter was handy at the start. The other day, I plugged it into one of the Windows 200 machines and it appeared as "Local Disk" rather than Jukebox. When I opened the directory, I found that the most used folders, "mp3s" and "college work" had had their names changed to meaningless gibberish, and were inaccessible, as was the case with many of the subfolders in the rest of the drive.

I'm well used to Windows 2000 being a bit special like that, so I disconnected the drive and turned it on in it's usual capacity as a portable mp3 player. To my dismay (ok, I coloured the air purple), the anomalous file and folder names remained, and the large part of my files including all my mp3's, were rendered inaccessible. This is still the case. I'm told, late of course, that the different OS's, while their manafacturers espouse their flexibility, use different file systems, and this has been known to **** things up. In another incident, a friend was using an external hard drive to edit a film on XP, and the PC all but ceased to function and was unusable for over a month. It turned that XP had decided to behave as though the external drive was the main drive of the machine, and in behaving in that way, had slowed down the machine by the amount of time it took to move memory over and back on a USB 1 cable, to and from a drive that's not exactly cutting edge either. I beleive this kind of unsolicited OS interference may be to blame, or something like it, but I just don't know.

I've tried upgrading the firmware, and that was no advantadge. I've tried running the device on all three OS's, and no luck (for what it's worth, XP and 2000 call it local disk, while 98 at least recognises it with a figure sequence that begins with a J, but is gibberish.). I'm sure formatting the drive would make the problem go away, but I shouldn't have to really, and it contains mp3's from since the Napster days until a month ago, work towards a portfolio, and photos I took in Barcelona over the summer, which of all the files are the most unreplacable.

Has anyone else had a similar experience? Does anyone know a way of fixing this problem without losing data? Any help, or even any anecdotes for comaprison, would be much appreciated. And for everyone else, don't make the same mistake as me and assume you'd never need to backup an external device.

Hydrosylator

Oh yeah, its an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20, to give it it's full title, almost left that one out entirely.

JamesB

You could always take an image of the drive in its current state & format it then? at least you could always restore it in the future if needs be - IF you find a solution sometime of course . Just an idea.. it's useless to you in its current state

Hydrosylator

That's not a bad idea at all. I should do that, but it'd be great if I could get the stuff back at some stage.

vibe666

to have your best chance of recovery you'll need the data in it's original location.

moving the data to somewhere else will only move what's readable by windows in its current state. any hope you have of retreiving your stuff lies with the actual structure of whats on that drive, rather than what windows will allow you to see, and moving it off the drive will remove your biggest chance for getting your stuff back.

your best bet for data recovery on that drive is http://www.grc.com/ SpinRite 6 or easy recovery pro, but neither are free i'm afraid.

Dempsey

Since it was picked up as a Local Disk, Write Caching was enabled then maybe this could have caused the problem

JamesB

Note i said take an IMAGE not a filecopy - if you took an image of the drive which copied the data sector by sector then you could restore it in its original state at whatever date you wanted.

vibe666 wrote:

to have your best chance of recovery you'll need the data in it's original location.

moving the data to somewhere else will only move what's readable by windows in its current state. any hope you have of retreiving your stuff lies with the actual structure of whats on that drive, rather than what windows will allow you to see, and moving it off the drive will remove your biggest chance for getting your stuff back.

your best bet for data recovery on that drive is http://www.grc.com/ SpinRite 6 or easy recovery pro, but neither are free i'm afraid.