[help] [urgent] Are my files gone?!

[colemancb]

Okay, so, I left my computer on by accident with iTunes open, and the power went out. When I turned on the computer again, and opened iTunes, it kept telling me alot of the songs I tried to play were corrupted and unreadable. So, I ran chkdsk and it said it repaired errors on the drive, and after that, Windows would not boot. (Hangs at acpitabl.dat). I don't even really care about this, as I just reinstalled Windows.

But, I reinstalled iTunes and copied my library over, now the music I know was 'corrupted' will not play at all. I tried coping to different locations on the drive, still no luck. I have a very large music collection, I have since abandoned CDs, so I can't get alot of this back, I can't even begin to find what is actually corrupted. Every time I run CHKDSK in the Recovery Console, it says "CHKDSK is performing additional scanning or recovery..." three times and then says that it didnt repair anything, just a normal check. Is there some other program I can use to check the disk more througly? Also, I have no floppy drive, but I can hook an extra one up if need be.

I will pay anyone who can get my files back! $10 to your Paypal! There's no telling what else may be corrupted.

Thank you so much!

--Chris

[CptMurphy]

It's possible that the files where corrupted. Try this, burn 'em to a cd or copy them to an mp3 player or another pc. See if they play there. If not, then it's possible that you had another codec that was used to play them, but doubtful. I don't know about anyone else, but I think u just learned a lesson in backing up ur stuff. SRY man.

[LLXX]

Doesn't iTunes use a proprietary DRM'd format for its music?

You should've converted them to MP3... corrupted MP3s are probably still going to be playable (but with obvious corruption) but I wouldn't think a format which is encrypted is going to be as robust. In other words, the chances that your music is going to be recoverable is near 0.

I doubt your hard drive has been physically damaged.

[rendrag]

well, a cheap battery backup would have done the trick as well...

it's likely that the files were corrupted. As m3n70r said, try them on a different PC with iTunes, or burn them to CD and listen to them on your PC or a CD player. If they work there, re-rip them to your computer.

Oh, and for those who don't know or realize it, if the track you just burnt to CD was purchased through iTunes music store, when you re-rip the track to your PC, you now just removed the DRM lock on it, so you have your normal fair use back (limitless copies on limitless PCs).

Edited July 4, 2006 by rendrag