Where to begin reloading music lost

[Nitecat]

My hard drive has bit the dust. I had previously been able to get 38 gig of my songs backed up, but was never able to get the rest done (no lectures please). I had a total of 53 gigs of songs, so have lost 15 gig and will need to reload them. My only other option at this point is to find someone who can try data recovery/clean room, but I assume that would be very expensive. I have song books already made up with the 53 gigs of songs and need the Book Ids to remain as previously loaded. With the news (wonderful Christmas present) from my electronic repair shop that they have found no way to retrieve the data, I am presented with determining what music I'm missing and how to go about reloading the 15 gigs of music that was lost. Figuring out what is missing....hhhmmm, not sure how to do this either. Also, do I point to the new drive that has the 38 gigs that are OK and rebuild the database, then reload the 15 gigs of lost music, making sure to load with the same book ID used before? I'm feeling a bit confused, so any advice would be appreciated. Not sure if this will work or if I'm missing something. Help!

[nreel]

If you were able to either save the the ORIGINAL SONGS.MDB (Prior to Hard Drive Failure) or Recover this file it will be of GREAT Help to you!

Assuming you have either saved or recovered the Original SONGS.MDB, copy it to a safe place.

Then, rebuild the DATABASE with the Sings you have recovered.

Now you will be able to compare the Old SONGS.MDB with the New SONGS.MDB and determine which Book IDs you have and the Book IDs you need.

Once determining this, re-import what is missing by manually selecting the Book ID that corresponds to each Missing Disc.


Hope this helps,

Norm

P.S. Pay no attention to anyone who may advise you that you may be complaining and that is just the cost of doing business (inside joke).

[Nitecat]

Norm,

Thanks for your input. I'll see if I can figure it out based on what you have said. If I have questions, I'll post again here. I may not be working on it now until after Christmas, so watch for me posting next week. Have a happy holiday.

[nreel]

Nitecat

I'll be watching...

Also, if you go the Songs.MDB route, make sure you copy the Songs.MDB file to a Temporary Folder before you rebuild your Database. Otherwise, you will copy over the Old Songs.MDB and you will lose all what was logged before your HD Failure.

Also, I was thinking, if you saved your Database from which you Printed your Song Lists, you can ALPHA SORT on the Book ID Column and determine from it what BookIDs/Discs are missing as compared to your Songs.MDB after you Rebuild the Database.

Norm

P.S. I had a HD Failure earlier this year and looked into a company retrieving the data. Depending on the HD size, your looking at $700 and up. The irony of my HD failure is that I bought that HD for Backup purposes. And, no sooner I moved 100 GIG of info to it, the Heads crashed. Sux...I know.

[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

[Beavis]

are you absolutely sure the hard drive is dead ??

you can always take the hard drive out of the case and hook it up to a desktop as a slave. it may run long enough to get all you kma files to another hard drive.