I got a new computer about two months ago and I finally had time to hook up another hard drive onto it. This is my dedicated music hard drive and it has a bunch of albums ripped onto it. The hard drive consists of a folder named music. Inside that folder, are more folders with artist names and inside those folders are folders with album names which contain the contents of CDs in mp3 format.
Now that I finally installed it and spent some time browsing through my collection, I have noticed a few of the folders are empty. Now I am by no means a computer genius but I know enough and I can’t, for the life of me, come up with a logical explanation for some of those folders turning up empty while others are still there. I’ve Audiosurfed with a few of the songs and the ones that are still there aren’t corrupted and seem to work just fine.
I’ve checked to make sure the files aren’t “hidden” and I don’t see any sort of pattern.
I’m not upset about it but I am curious. Anyone want to guess how this happened?
Also, is there a program that can search for empty folders and delete them?
I used Windows Media Player 10 on the old computer. I’ve only browsed them via Windows Explorer on the new one. They’re both Windows XP in case that matters.
Is it internal or external drive, not that it really should matter.
What you’re saying is when you hooked your drive up to the old computer the files say “acme.mp3” was there. Now when you hooked the drive up to your new computer your “acme.mp3” doesn’t show up.
No reformatting took place when the new computer recognized the old hard drive did it?
What you could do is go to Snapfiles and look for somthing like undelete plus and see if the files somehow got deleted.
There a a few good free recovery programs from Snapfiles or FileHippo.
One last thing are you missing any of the FOLDERS? Or is it just the files?
It’s possible WMP renamed the files and moved them to other directories using their ID3 tags (or, failing that, using CDDB). This happens a lot if there are minor variations in certain fields, such as the file being named “John Lennon & The Beatles - Some Famous Pop Song.mp3” while the Artist field in the metadata just said “John Lennon”.
If you want to check this, go into the options on your old WMP installation. Under Library, is “Rearrange music in rip music folder, using rip music settings” set?
It’s a 250gb internal drive (not that I have anywhere near that much music).
The folders are still there but the files are missing.
So D:\music\beatles\abbey road\ is there but the mp3s of the songs are missing.
I’ve never seen WMP rename a file but maybe, at some point, a setting got changed that I wasn’t aware of.
No reformatting took place, unless it happened in a matter of seconds. The installation went smoothly. I connected the cables, turned on the computer and the disk was already recognized.