Long story short: over 3,000 Mp3s I had been collecting/trading over the past two years are, like, gone.
First my computer starts acting up by being sluggish and freezing. Then it refused to open up some Mp3s I was downloading (although I was listening to a Winamp playlist at the time) – after that, it refused to let me open up the folder where I kept all my music files, saying folder was corrupted.
So I restarted my computer, because most glitches clear up when I restart and typically, you know, I go with what I know. But THEN the computer started doing something weird: I forget the exact message, but it said something about my files missing some sort of link and began doing something to the music files… … ‘Orphan truncated.’ I sort of freaked and restarted the computer twice more. Each time, the computer continued to insist there was something missing.
Against my better judgement I sat back and let the computer do its thing… part of the message said each cluster was being ‘…corrected.’ (HA!) When the dust settled and the computer turned all the way on, I was able to go straight to my music folder and all but 241 files were gone. Most of the ones that were left often only had a second of the opening strands of music. Disgusted, I dumped the rest of those partial fragments in the recycle bin. :smack:
I did some poking around and discovered that my computer generated a file of some 10,000 fragmented files, most of which were 16k fragments of my music. (I have since dumped that file in the recycle bin, too)
I still don’t understand what exactly happened. How did the folder get corrupted in the first place? Why wouldn’t my peer-sharing filter stop viruses from getting through? I want to know exactly what I should have done to avoid this. Anybody care to venture a guess what happened? (I have a Pentium 3 Gateway 2000 with a Windows 2000 Professional version O/S)
What’s the best way to safeguard my Mp3 files in the future so this doesn’t happen again?
– one last thinG: I am currently defragmenting my computer. I notice now that the icons on my desktop (My Computer, Recycle Bin, My Internet Explorer icon, and others) are moving around by themselves whenever my mouse arrow gets near them. Now what screwy thing is causing THAT?