Huge XP Problem (Filetable errors)

Here is a quick summary of the problem, with a detailed explanation below:

Problem: Some of my mp3 audio files have swapped audio data. The filenames, directories and file sizes are all the same as they were before - but when trying to play my favorite Jazz mp3, it instead plays some Rock through the speakers... This was all after some type of XP Utility ran after a reboot - what looked similar to the CHKDSK utility...

How can I go about fixing my audio files, so that the correct music syncs up with the correct files again?



Detailed Explanation:
Have I got a problem for you, which baffles even me. If you could take a few
minutes to please review the following explanation of my problem, it would be
very much appreciated!

The situation:

For the second time now, the audio data of my mp3s - specifically newly
added mp3's dating about a month old or newer - has swapped itself with other
audio data of other mp3s. The filenames, directories, file size and Tags all
remain in original state, but the audio that comes through the speaker - has
changed.

Example: When attempting to play track 01 of my favorite Jazz album - the
audio that I will hear - will be track 05 of my favorite Rock album!

Tracks also have not just simply swapped... the track 05 of the Rock album
that has replaced the track 01 - starts mid song. As it progresses to track
02 of what should be the Jazz album, it will instead continue from track 05
of the rock album and eventually go to track 06 of the Rock album. (An odd
example but I hope it makes the problem Iâ?Tm having clear)

It's as if all the audio data of all my new mp3s, was lined up as a giant
stream of music - and then it was shifted over without shifting over the
actual files.

The cause:

I believe this has to do with Windows XP repairing "corrupt files" on
reboot. I can't exactly remember what the program that popped up called the
files...but a large list scrolled, indicating that it was repairing these
files.

Nothing caused the system to shutdown in error before this reboot. It was a
simple power down. A newly installed 120 GB hard drive had been installed
into the system, and had been completely updated by Windows Update. The
system had been reset and powered down in success before, but it was this one
time, upon rebooting the system - a utility screen came up, similar to the
chkdsk utility, which began to scroll the many files - "repairing" them. The
hard drive in question in which the files are contained, is not the OS hard
drive - it's a secondary storage drive - of 160 GB (149 GB formatted).

The chkdsk utility ran without any instruction to do so by myself, on the
secondary drive that had been working perfectly with my previously installed
HDD and WindowsXP. Nothing was modified before or after installing this new
drive, so why it ran in the first place is still unknown.

My Thoughts:

Due to my discovery of this chkdsk utility (it may of been a different
utility - it ran in the light blue WinXP screen after reboot, not in DOS) - I
can only assume this was the cause of the error. I didn't catch that utility
running last time I had this problem and dismissed it as corrupt data due to
the old age of the previous files I had the problem with; and the large
amount of internet radio streams that I listen to, which I had thought was
the source of the newly replaced audio on the older mp3s.)

I can only assume this was due to that utility making some type of
adjustments to file table - which has in turn, caused the data to be swapped.
Again - all file names, file sizes, file locations, mp3 tags and directory
names have all remained the same - it's only the audio data that has changed.
I also think this has something to do with the common error of Crosslinked
files.

Fearing this may only be my PC - due to some file table synchronization
issue - I sent a few test mp3's to a friend of mine - for him to play them on
his PC to test for this swapped audio issue. He reported that it also played
incorrectly on his system, which indicated that the physical audio data of
each file has indeed been changed.

As one of the most frustrating issues I have come across, I ask for your
help to insure that my personal collection of music (all legally obtained and
owned) is corrected back to its original state. I couldn't imagine having to
once again, bite the bullet and say goodbye to some of my favorite music
files.

Thank you for your time!

 

Wish I had a clue how to help you fix things.

I am just bumping this back to the top for more looks. I can think of a couple of folks on here who might be able to suggest something so just making sure the thread is up top so they can see it.

 

I beleive you are basically at the point of no return. I've included a picture that explains the nature of the corruption. The top line is a list of files, and also tracks where they are on the disk. The rest of the lines represent the data of those files. CHKDSK found some horrible corruption on your drive, and attempted to clean up the mess as best it could.
Microsoft Knowledge Base Article - 314835

This kind of corruption cannot be magically fixed. Its a tedious, by-hand process of peicing the files together, by an expert. Its just music, so you are basically out of luck unless you have a lot of money to spend on recovery.

PLEASE NOTE Every peice of data on that drive is now suspect, and potentially corrupt. You should immediatly archive, backup or otherwise get everything important to you off that drive and format it. Verifying the integrity of the data is going to be potentially a lot of work.

Once the files are corrupted, they are literally changed, which is why it persisted when you gave one to your buddy. Its a little late now, but may i strongly suggest you pickup a CD or DVD burner to archive important or difficult to replace data. They are really cheap (40$ for the burner, 15 cents for 600 megs of backup media).

Im sorry you lost data.

 

I wonder if a System Restore prior to the chkdsk would repair anything? Probably not, or Joe would have said so. I have never seen XP trigger a chkdsk on its own, either. Do you use Home or Pro? I rip cds, then make MP3 (data) cds for the convenience of backups. Another alternative for replacing special music is www.winmx.com You have to be patient, but you can usually get anything if you keep checking the different servers. Did you have your drives partitioned? I have found that keeping XP on it's own partition has helped me to recover data, in the event of an XP burp. Sorry this happened to you. Post back if you have any questions.

Johanna

 

I'm afraid not Johanna. Check this MSDN Article out for what SR can and can't do.

 

Joe, I didn't think SR would help! SR does not even look at data files, only System ones. Theoretically, SR does not affect My Docs (where "My Music" lives by default) at all.

Maybe you could tell me what triggers an automatic chkdsk w/o the user's consent, and what might have happened to make the files so corrupt that chkdsk tried to "fix" them?

I operate on the KISS principle. I do regular backups, so these kinds of issues are always on somebody else's computer, not one I have time to play with. If my music files (10 gigs on my HD, second partition, right now) went haywire, I would just delete them, and use my MP3 cds to restore them, as I wanted to. In nearly 3 years with XP, that has not happened to me, and neither has a chkdsk that I didn't initiate. What kind of hiccup would corrupt so many files, is there any preventitive maintenance a user can take, and am I correct in assuming there is no alternative but restoring with available backups at this point? Does the large size of the two hard drives come into play here? Just curious, as usual!

Johanna

 

The chkdsk utility ran without any instruction to do so by myself, on the secondary drive that had been working perfectly with my previously installed HDD and WindowsXP.If the system sniffs serious file/drive problems it will flag things as 'dirty' and will try to run a chkdsk at next boot. Basically it will give you about 10 seconds to say No but if you don't, it will run.

When this happens you can opt to stop it if you are watching closely but if so, best to copy off any files you are fond of (and hope they aren't damaged too badly) and then set chkdsk to run since you are looking at a drive that isn't going to work real well unless you do.

 

i agree with newt's description. The actual technical details arent something you can control or influance. Everything from a rude shutdown from powerloss, a partition magic gone bad, cosmic rays from mars, misbehaving apps, dirty power, mechnical malfunction.. the list goes on and on.

The good news is that ntfs, for most users, is pretty fault tolerant, and can survive most BadThings. When something goes really bad, it can usually dig itself back out, occassionally though, things can go horribly wrong, as in alphakry's case. Chkdsk can usually repair minor problems, but once things get to a point, it can actually do a lot more harm than good in destroying existing files. Lots of fun debate on that topic, but for most of this audience, chkdsk is a good thing, and your last best hope for recovering the situation. I would NOT advocate bypassing chkdsk for a consumer/home user. Disk problems start very very small, and snowball into a train wreck.

 

All your responses are very much appreciated. Thank you for taking the time to review this very frustrating issue.

Here's the story, the best I can recall, months later.

One day - the majority of the data - was magically fixed. I don't remember taking any drastic measures to correct it - but I do know that many of the files found to be corrupted, on the audio content level, seemed to be fixed. I quite possibly (again, months ago) - deleted any files that were not corrected - and have since replaced them.

Now, months later, it appears to have happened again with certain files - first noticed with absolutely brand new songs - not even a week old.

I have defiantly made a habit of backing up my data - but the problem here is that I produce and archive music, as well as run a small recording studio and consider myself a connoisseur of many genres of music. SOO - the data we speak of isn't a few gigs - but about 210GB.

This is a tough thing to continuously backup - especially when you are frequently making such changes as idtags, filenames, directory structure - not to mention what has become almost a full-time job of sorting and adding new music.

A new problem has also been recognized. A newly created directory - containing both new and old data - displays an error when trying to access it:
"directory is not accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable."
This has just occurred when plugging the drive into a new system, running Windows2000. I have not yet tested it on my XP system. I don't see how this fact would make any difference, but will list it anyhow as a possible factor.

When I restart the pc now, it IS asking to run a chkdsk on it ... and to the best of my knowledge from the information above - I do not want to let it do this. So I have been canceling out of it. But can still not access certain directories.

From doing a search, it appears that the files, which have become corrupted - have been created/modified within a certain date range. I am unclear thou, what could of occurred on these dates that could of caused it. (In fact, the only thing I can guess happened in this date range was that the drive was placed into a different PC.)

So this ball continues to roll... unfortunately not on a smooth path.

 

Ok ... so to make things further confusing!

since my post above, I have probably rebooted that "other" PC with the drive in it, about 5 times... canceling the chkdsk utility each time - and the problem has remained (unable to browse certain folders, audio data swapped)...

Since - I have returned it to my original PC in the studio - from which the majority of the files have been transferred to this disk. It still asks to run chkdsk at each boot (rebooted about 3 times since drive has been installed)

BUT[b/] yet again, the file have returned to their previous, normal state. I can access all the folders again - as well as play the songs in their entirety without any audio data corruption...

Again, the only difference between the two systems is that one is the most up to date version of Windows2000 - and my studio PC is the most up to date version of XP Pro. All drives in both equations are 7200RPM Western Digital IDE drives - running single NTFS partitions.

I was convinced that this was really going to boil down to the way windows handles data in certain circumstances - possibly a bug when handling large amounts of audio data, which is consistently modified, relocated and added to. But the inconsistency of this problem leaves me completely baffled.

 

anyone have suggestions/input?

 

NTFS and 2K or XP should not have problems dealing with your data as you describe it. On the other hand, if you had hardware issues with a drive or drive controller, I would not expect to see the periods of time you have when things improve on their own. Interesting problem to read about although it has to be frustrating for you to deal with.

I'm gonna have to give this some thought and do some research but a couple of questions now.

What total file count and what Hd size?

How deep is your folder structure at it's worst/deepest?

For instance, c:\my-stuff\music\rock\ would be 3 folders and 22 characters. Your mention of all the time you have to spend arranging things makes me wonder if you simply have run past the length file name the OS can deal with.
c:\my-stuff\music\rock\boom-boom.wav would be seen by the OS as basically a 36 character file name.

I don't know right off hand what the limits are but there are several values where you may have limited or exceeded what the OS can deal with.

Note to anyone else - PLEASE feel free to jump in here. I may be on a wild goose chase or may have trouble dredging up information so if you know or can make reasonable guesses, please do.

 

Could using the drive on two different systems have any bearing on the problem ?

Just because both might be ( for idea only ) XP does not mean they are going to handle things the same way. Settings may be just enough different to cause problems.

BillyBob

 

Windows NT & 2k have a maximum path size defined as MAX_PATH which is 255 characters and I believe XP can handle 256 characters. Could just be the root of your problem. Try shortening the path. Just a couple of characters out of some folder name would prove the theory.

I may be all wet and that limit may only apply to command lines but still worth a shot I think. I'm not even sure the numbers are exact but the principal is worthy.

 

surferdude2

That was somewhat part of my thoughts about the same HD being used on two different systems.

Settings of and capabilities of each can make a difference.

BillyBob

 

Yeah, that's a good thought BB. I've tested the path length before but I never counted all the characters after I got it to fail. And it did fail. The procedure entailed naming some file with the maximum allowable characters by merely holding down a key. Then going up one folder and renaming the folder using the same method. Repeat that for a couple or so more times up the path. That eventually gets you a file you can't do anything much with.