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Old June 7th, 2006, 01:00 AM
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Manc Manc is offline
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Join Date: Jun 2006
O/S: Windows XP Pro
Location: Manchester, UK
Posts: 115
Right, what I'm about to suggest is probably a long shot, but here goes...

First of all, not so much a suggeston but more agreement with a previous one, I can't help thinking Oracle could be onto something with what he's said. It's typical behaviour for when default settings are restored. I don't have sufficient knowledge to inform you as to how to recover them if this has happened, but it may spark another user here to offer a possible idea or solution. It's sounds very feasible, let's put it that way.

Secondly, disk usage. If there was tons of music (would help to know how much), then a noticeable amount of disk space would be used. Now, this is the tricky bit, were you actually looking at that prior to this happening, do you remember roughly how much it was if you were? Is there a noticeable difference now? If there is, chances are they're gone.

Third, to double check something. Perhaps, and it's a big perhaps, the folders have become hidden or hidden themselves. I've only known this to happen once, and it certainly wasn't because I'd hid them, so another long shot. Anyway, go to Control panel, select Folder Options, and then View. You'll see down that list an option for Hidden Files and Folders, select the option to show them and click Apply. Remember to reset this back once you've checked. Now go back and check whether there's anything in there. If, by stroke of luck, they have become hidden and you now see them, right click the containing folders and you'll see the option to uncheck 'hidden'. Click apply. Who knows? Like I said, long shots. I wasn't sure that Windows would let you hide those folders but I just checked, and it does. So there's nothing special about them in that respect.

And last of all and if all the above fails, you could try putting the disk in another machine, taking ownership of the folders in question and looking to see if they show up there. If they don't, I'm afraid they're probably gone.


If it turns out they are gone or have been deleted, then I really feel for you because if I lost my music I'd be gutted. I know it's a bit after the fact (however who knows, you may find it useful to know for the future), but valuable stuff like music and pictures of family and such should really be backed up onto a second hard drive. USB 2.0 drives and enclosures are handy for this and are quite easy to hook up. You don't need to open the PC, you just plug them in.

I know that doesn't help now, but if you find these files, or when you next build up a collection of valuable files, you'll think much more about that than most people, and will therefore be more capable of preventing it happening.

Good luck, I really hope you find a solution to this.
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