I think I may have lost everything - HELP!

[billythedj66]

I downloaded the Virtual Music Jukebox free version just to try out on my computer, in the process of moving my music files, the program froze.  After the computer was rebooted, all myt music files were nowhere to be found.  Are they lost forever?  If so, I am so not happy since most of these files were rare songs I ripped from old vinyl records.  Of course all the records have been sold and also gone forever.  If ayone can a) tell me if the files are truly gone forever or b) tell me how to recover them or c) how I can beat the crap out of the people at Virtual Music Jukebox, it would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Bill

[CitznFish]

try posting on VMJ's message board. I have no answers for you. Maybe siomeone else will.

typically transferring files will not delete them. Were they on teh same harddrive? I'm sure they're on your harddrive somewhere. Did you check your recyle bin? Are you running Norton Anti-virus? if so, check Norton Protected Files in your recycle bin

[krick]

You should check out this free file recovery program...

PC INSPECTOR File Recovery

When files are deleted, they are not erased, the file system just removes them from the file table and marks the space on the drive that they occupied as "available".  

Everything you do on your computer is writing files to the hard drive that may overwrite your data files if they are still there.

When you lose files, the best thing to do is immediately shut down the computer, remove the hard drive, connect it as a secondary drive on another computer and run the file recovery software linked above on that computer to recover the files from your drive.

I had the same thing happen to me recently.  I just bought and installed a new 120GB Seagate hard drive and began moving many, many gigabytes of files onto it.  about an hour into the process, the new drive completely failed.

Using the process above, I was able to recover most of the files from my original drive.  Some of the casualties were large VOB and CHD files that were over 1GB each.  The larger the file, the more likely that one of it's clusters will be overwritten after it is deleted.  Also, if you keep your drive thoroughly defragged, it's supposed to be less likely that writing to the drive will overwrite multiple deleted files.

The one big lesson I learned in this ordeal...

NEVER move files
ALWAYS copy files

...that way, if something goes wrong, you still have the original copy.