[Nitecat]

Norm,

OK, I've made it through the Christmas festivities and am back at this thing and trying to understand how to begin my reloading process. My questions may seem dumb, but here goes....

Q1. Would the original songs.mdb file you mentioned be the songs file that is in a Microsoft Access Database format? What software is the .mdb extension from? I have my Hoster program and databases on my laptop C: drive. There is a songs file and also a couple of Temp files in the Databases folder. Not sure what they all are. Are any of these what I am looking for? What I have lost is about 15 gigs of my KMA files that were on an external drive.

Q2. I do not have Access software. Will I need this to do what you have suggested? If so, I have Access on my work PC, if I can somehow use that for this. Will I be printing something out once I open the file assuming I can find a way to open it?

Q3. You said to copy the songs file to a temp file, then rebuild database. Just to clarify for myself (and please correct me if any of this is wrong):

-copy song file to a temp file
-this temp file would have info about my original 53 gigs (what all is in this file?)
-I then point Hoster to my good external backup drive that has the 38 gigs I managed to backup before the other external drive failure and do Tools, Build Songs Database
-this will leave me with a temp file of info on my 53 gigs and a new song file with info on the 38 gigs I managed to save
-by comparing these two somehow, I can determine what I need to reload

Is this correct? What all info. shows in these files? Is there a way to print them out?

Q4. You also mentioned doing an ALPHA SORT (not sure why alpha) on Book ID and comparing this to the rebuilt songs.mdb. Which do you think would be best? I have not changed anything in the database folders on my C:drive, so what I used for my song books is still there.

Q5. I spent a lot of time correcting information that was wrong with the song title and artist names (Using the Edit Songs feature) prior to my external hard drive failure. I don't want to have to do this again. When I reload the 15 gigs that are missing, will it pull in the song titles and artist names as I had corrected then or am I going to lose that and need to fix these again? Will doing the Build Songs Database to rebuild delete all of that? Sure wish there were some way to first figure out what KMA files I am missing and get them back onto my good external hard drive without changing the databases that have been corrected. I do want the databases to still match my song books though, since I just spent a lot of time and money on new books.

Guess that is all of my questions for now. I probably sound pretty dumb, but oh well. I don't want to screw anything up and figure it's better to ask now. I understand some of how Hoster and all these files work together, but not totally and it sure can be confusing.

Any help will be GREATLY appreciated. Nitecat