Jason Harris 31 Report post Posted July 18, 2006 A few months ago, a power surge blew out my desktop's power supply. It was under warranty, but Best Buy gave me the horror story that information could be lost during repair. Since I couldn't turn on the machine to backup files, I asked a friend whether BB would need the hard drive to test the machine after changing the power supply. He replied that they should be able to run off the BIOS for testing. So I removed my main hard drive, which had all my accounting information. I had a second drive that was in the expansion slot, on the Slave cable and 99% full of MP3 files, so it never occurred to me that the idiot at Best Buy's tech support department would switch it to the Master Cable and overwrite the drive with Windows to test it. :o Man, I was freakin' pissed! It had taken me weeks to record all my CD's. I used a program to try to recover my songs -- which tied up my computer for three days -- and it found 20,000 songs that I saved to an external hard drive. However, the files have been renamed along the lines of "MP3_18574.mp3," and I'm having trouble renaming the files to "Pink Floyd - Money.mp3." If I look into the Properties, all the information for the songs is there, but Windows won't let me change the names.Any suggestions? (I could try to recover the songs again, if needed, because I haven't touched that hard drive since then.) Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Jim A 4 Report post Posted July 18, 2006 any chance if you log them online via itunes or whatever and click the get CD info that the right CDDB info will rename? Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
jay 1 Report post Posted July 18, 2006 Look for a utility called ID3 renamer. It will scour the ID3 tags and name the files however you want. For example: Artist - Album - Track# - Song Title Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
awall 0 Report post Posted July 19, 2006 Chances are that you will have to write off your files as lost. Part of them will be overwritten by the new operating system, which probably formatted the hard drive when it installed. I always format a harddrive before install of a new operating system since it means you get a clean install.Is it possible to try to recover the files, yes, but it is very time consuming and expensive and not always 100% reliable.Should BB have formatted and installed the OS? Questionable. From their point of view you brought them a computer that didn't work and paid them to get it running, which they did. Now if you specifically told them to just replace the powersupply and nothing else then you have a valid arguement. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
delpiero81 0 Report post Posted July 19, 2006 There are a bunch of programs that have worked for me (to completely erase files it's very difficult even if you overwrite them couple of times...) if i remember right "recover my files" wasnt bad but i tryed also some others; if they only formatted the HD it's not a problem, dont expect to recover all of your mp3 but most of them and in any case you can still have the name of the corrupted ones.The ones i remember were "East-Tec Eraser" and "recover my files" but there are plenty of them, and if they cost too much for you... i just say torrentspy.com...And yes recovering files takes time... Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Vapor 0 Report post Posted July 19, 2006 Yeah formating dosent delete any data. Formating just deletes the table of contents which indexs the data. If you ever want to get rid of data and have the data (pretty much) unrecoverable, do a DoD Swap. It stands for department of defense. It pretty much runs a random string of binary code (1010101) and overwrites all the old data. Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
