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Corrupt hard drive
https://forum.dead-donkey.com/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=19237		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  George Tatum [ Tue Dec 16, 2008 10:42 am ]
Post subject:  Corrupt hard drive
I had a hard drive crash last week which destroyed my Soulseek partition. The partition wouldn't chkdsk as Windows thought it was a raw disc so I used Power Data Recovery on the physical drive. This initially appeared to do the trick, it recovered virtually everything BUT when I came to play the mp3's they were almost all corrupt. It would usually start playing the correct track, then skip to something else (maybe even something I've deleted), then maybe another track or maybe back to the original track, sometimes in the exact position it had stopped before.

I think I understand what's going on here. I have obviously lost the TOC and Slsk doesn't allocate contiguous disk space, it allocates space as it needs it and then renames the file on completion. My guess is that the files were horribly fragmented (I should have done a regular defrag then but the partition was usually too full to allow this) and the recovery program finds the start address and filesize of each track and assumes that it is x contiguous blocks starting at location y.

Does this sound a reasonable assumption? Is there anything I can do other than bin the HD and start again? A professional recovery service would probably cost more than it's worth and I don't really want to say "can you please recover 20GB of pirate music". At least I have recovered the directory structure so I know what to look for again, and the slsk community have been very helpful.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Tue Dec 16, 2008 3:07 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Corrupt hard drive
That sounds exactly my experience with a hard drive failure. You get back the odd file, but most a filled with trash.

Did you have your music on a portable? I have my entire music collection on my 80GB ipod, so you can use podrip to get it back to your disk.

As for the future... I think ext3 might be better than ntfs/fat32 as it doesn't get fragmented. There's also recovery tools you can sue that amazingly have worked for me 100% when i lost the TOC on ext3. Its not natively supported by windows (its a linux filesystem), but there's a driver here:
http://www.fs-driver.org/
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Tue Dec 16, 2008 3:09 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Corrupt hard drive
oh soulseek is a p2p :lol: How quaint! I get all my song as complete albums from news, so far so good :)
Author:  Xoal [ Tue Dec 16, 2008 7:26 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Corrupt hard drive
spudthedestroyer wrote:
oh soulseek is a p2p :lol: How quaint! I get all my song as complete albums from news, so far so good :)


Soulseek makes it pretty easy to get full albums.

Thats what I use sometimes, because it has some pretty rare stuff.

But it organizes everything by folder, so as long as the uploader isn't an idiot, you can find full albums very easily.
Author:  spudthedestroyer [ Thu Dec 18, 2008 2:23 am ]
Post subject:  Re: Corrupt hard drive
newsgroups is single click, scene release of albums rarred with nfo and checksums. ;)
I don't doubt there's single mp3s of rarity, but for albums i find it easier to use emule or newsgroups. Thus far i've got everything i've searched for.
Author:  George Tatum [ Thu Dec 18, 2008 3:53 pm ]
Post subject:  Re: Corrupt hard drive
Looks like I was right then as regards the fragmentation, it might be worth giving ext3 a go then, as long as rthe Windows drivers are stable. I'd much prefer to run Linux but most of the software I want to run isn't available, and I don't particularly want to run it under emulation. I know Unix and know full well how much more stable it is.

I have a 20GB mp3 player which I wish I'd backed all this stuff up to but I didn't, I also have a 2GB which had the precise total of one of the lost albums on it. :(
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