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Originally Posted by pselph2528

Help, I have used hoster for over 2 yrs andnever had any problems untill up grading to 3318 and then 3319. Today i turned my computor on and all 65,000 + songs were gone from my external hard drive-- it worked fine last night. Can someone give me an idea of what happened and how to fix it?

Paul, I don't know what to say. Hoster has never deleted KMA files itself in all the time we have been shipping it. The fact that you were using the files the night before is VERY STRONG evidence it was not upgrading to Hoster 3.319 that caused this problem.

I'm not trying to pass the buck, and maybe something went amuck in our upgrading to be fully Vista compliant (even on 2000 and XP), but I would look for some other problem first.

How old is your drive?

From what I understand, you have used My Computer (or Explorer) and verified there are no KMA files on this drive. I wish you hadn't run the "fix" program. That may have ruined all chances of recovering any songs that were still there. If only the File Allocation Table (FAT or NTSF format) was damaged, the files would still be recoverable.

See my post #16 below. It is THE BEST recommendation we can make to truly hope to recover songs on your damaged disc.

After running SpinRite, if it recovers anything, do the following:

1. Run the Tools menu Build Songs Database command. If you are afraid to do this, read the manual first. This command opens the KMA files for read, reads the header data, and adds the contents to the new Songs Database being built. MAKE SURE your external drive and folders (if not the root drive) are in the Build Songs Database list window. If not, add them before building or the external drive won't be found.

2. Play some of the songs. If you know the last ones you imported, then try them. Also, try some of the first you imported and some in the middle. This is a "spot check" only, and is by no means conclusive. However, it's a confidence builder that the files now in the Songs Database are really there and able to play.

3. If no KMA files are found on the external drive by the Build Songs Database command, and you ran the undelete program, the files are gone.

4. Before you do anything to restore files to this hard drive, you need to run chkdsk with the Start menu > Run > "chkdsk". This will verify if all areas are good.

5. Run the Disc Defragment program in Start menu > Program Files > System > Disc Defragment. This will also check for any bad areas.

If any bad areas are reported they will be "logged out" of use. However, I'd strongly consider replacing the drive as it has already proven to be unreliable... if it is the drive.

DO NOT do anything that would back up any restored files over your good 52,000 files. You need another backup drive to try to recover what you can... BEFORE you overwrite your 52,000 good files.