Oh god, my Music library
OK, so I accidentally toasted my substantial music collection last night. Everyone who knows me knows that I pride this eclectic, pedantic, hoarded and polished music collection more than anything else that I own: it’s essentially my life’s work thus far, and to lose it is comparable to losing a limb. Therefore I’m pretty careful about backing it up but, .. (and I really regret doing this).. I plugged the hard drive into the hackintosh and installed the NTFS-3g For Mac to gain read/write access to the NTFS formatted drive, after persuading myself that nothing bad could come of it.
Apparently there’s a bug or something in NTFS-3G because smoehow the whole allocation table (or whatever it is that NTFS uses) got wiped, leaving me with intact files on the drive and no map telling the PC where they are. Essentially, they’re gone.`
Cue my scrambling for the Insanely Mac forum, crying (not literally: I took a backup 8 weeks ago. That’s painfully long ago, but .. well, it’s a thousand million times better than nothing) about the whole sorry story.
I didn’t get a reply (yet) but I’ve been able to determine (I think) that the files are recoverable:
Wahoo it found the files..
Unfortunately, this is a demo version of the app: to actually restore my data they want $100 for a license, which is a little steep considering I don’t intend to ever need to use it again. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something else, as that’s a ridiculous price.
I’ll keep looking, see if there’s a cheaper/ freeware version of a similar program
Ian
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This is very strange. NTFS-3G works perfectly for quite a long time for me and apparently for many other people too.
Are you sure you safely detached your external drive when you rebooted or when you removed it? Not doing so can cause file accessibility problem but CHKDSK must be able to restore their visibility.
Or maybe it’s hardware related? The NTFS-3G site lists several known bad hardware models with Seagate, WD, Lacie, etc: http://www.ntfs-3g.org/support.html#ioerror
It’s important to use one of the latest releases: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/
There are some old, broken packages still floating around on very popular Mac sites on the Internet.
Hey BBrian, cheers for your reply
“Are you sure you safely detached your external drive when you rebooted or when you removed it? Not doing so can cause file accessibility problem but CHKDSK must be able to restore their visibility. ”
It was actually an internal drive that got toasted: I think it was after restarting that the files vanished, maybe the drive wasn’t unmounted properly or something like that. It was definately corrupted though, because the files were hidden in windows too.
As an aside, the problem with the paragon NTFS software which i tried afterwards seemed to occur during read/write operations by iTunes that the problems occurred. Maybe the fault with this lies in an incompatibility between iTunes and it’s write actions to an NTFS drive?
Anyway, I was using the latest build from http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/ at the time.
Are you involved in development for NTFS-3G at all? Small world if so
Ian