Brodie you actually need to run Alsoft's Disk Warrior on this drive. Then I would also run Norton Disk Doctor. Disk Doctor is included in the Norton Utilities & Systemworks suites.

Disk Warrior will rebuild the drive's directory. This may help those files become visible to Pro Tools.
Disk Doctor will repair files the have been damaged during normal use. This may help Pro Tools by verifying creation dates and correcting miss-configured custom icons.

None of these solutions are guaranteed to work, but these are the first steps a savvy Mac user should take. When using Pro Tools, Final Cut Pro, Avid, Cubase or really any heavy app that writes constantly to a hard drive, Disk Warrior and Disk Doctor should be in your toolbox for maintanance and repair.

Brodie, try running these apps and if your drive is still troublesome, please let us know on this thread. I'll watch it and see what else we can do for you.

Good Luck!!!

Thank you for youur reply nuclearmoon.
This morning i ran diskwarrior and then disk doctor.

Diskwarrior did not report anything. Disk doctor found a major problem in the header block, and found damaged resource forks in the files that pro tools can not open. It asked if i wanted to create aliases and i did.

I still cannot use any of the affected files in pro tools

any other suggestions?

thanks

First off, is this an internal drive or an external? If it is external, try copying a session and its respective audio files to one of your internal drives and see if it will open from there. You will still have to tell PT where to find the files and it will ask you to verify disk allocation....this is all fine, just do what PT tells you. If the session opens, let me know here.

The drive is a 200GB Maxtor Internal drive.
I have already tried copying the session and audio files over to another drive, with no luck.

Brodie, pal, at this point things look bad. According to all resources I have checked if your files have bad resource forks, the only way to repair them is if the software that uses them has a repair utility. Pro Tools has no repair utility that I know of. Let this thread sit here and maybe one of these other mac guys can think of more to do.

My advice to avoid this in the future:
1. Partition that big drive into smaller chunks. Four 50GB sections would be good.
2. Run Disk Doctor every other week and Speed Disk every week.
3. Run Disk Warrior every month
4. BACKUP EVERY DAY. Use CD, DVD, or another drive.

I am really sorry this happened to you. I hope that you can quickly recover and it won't cost you too much.
Let me know how it goes. Good Luck!

Thank you for all of your help.

some good news. 2 of the songs have recognised the previously missing files. Unfortunately, they were only missing a couple small files each that was easy for me to fix. None of the sessions which all the audio is damaged aare working, but any progress is good progress, i guess.

I have told the boss that we need more than one 60GB backup dive to cover 2 platforms that run constantly, but i guess he never really listened to me. Maybe now he will, once he hears that I have to book a week for this band to come back and re-record the songs that were lost, fo free.

Fortunatelly, I don't really loose monetarily, on this. I just don't make anything for the extra time I now must put in. Oh well, perks of the job, right?

Do you have any guesses on why this happened?
It just kinda came out of the blue one day after tracking was finished. And unfortunately, I had to wait for the backup drive to free before i could back it up, but that was all it took for things to go bad.

Thanks again for all your help.

There are several things you can try.

1. Make backup copies of all good and corrupted audio files on your HDD. Get ResEdit. Check the resource fork of a damaged file using Resedit. From ResEdit Reference (http://developer.apple.com/documentation/mac/pdf/ResEditReference.pdf):

Resource Checking 2
Sometimes a resource file gets corrupted. This is typically the result of a crash occurring
while the file is being updated. In the past, ResEdit would occasionally crash when you
tried to open a damaged file with it. Versions of ResEdit starting with 2.0 provide
resource file checking facilities to help avoid crashes and to minimize loss of data. The
checking facility does not detect corrupted individual resources; it bases its tests on the
file’s resource map.
When you open a file, ResEdit performs a partial resource check on it. This test verifies
only that the resource map is located after the end of the resource data area, and that the
header, data, and map do not extend beyond the EOF (end-of-file mark) of the resource fork. If the file does not pass these initial tests, a full test is automatically performed. If
you choose “Verify files when they are opened” in the Preferences dialog box, ResEdit
performs a full test whenever you open a file.
If you want to invoke the full test yourself, choose Verify Resource File from the
File menu.
When it performs a full resource check, ResEdit goes through the entire resource map
and verifies that the type list, the reference lists, and the name list are consistent, that all
resource data areas can be located, and that they do not exceed the available file size. It
also checks for duplicate types, and for duplicate ID numbers within each type. ResEdit
has several techniques for locating the resource map, the existence and location of which
is critical to the process of recovering damaged resource files.
If damage is discovered, the user is offered a repair option. This procedure does not
change the damaged file. Instead, ResEdit creates a new file, extracts all the resources it
can find in the damaged file, and copies them to the new file. It then renames the old file
(with an extension of “(damaged)”. ResEdit also presents the user with status
information about the resources that were extracted.
There is one exception to the rule that the damaged file is not changed: minor damage
occurs whenever a resource file is not properly closed. ResEdit repairs this damage
without asking the user’s permission. (The actual process involved is quite simple:
ResEdit calls the Resource Manager to open the file, calls the
UpdateResFile
routine to
rewrite the resource map, and closes the file.) After performing the repair, it presents an
alert box to inform the user that it has done so.

2. take the corrupted files over to a PC. If they're WAV or AIFF, append the proper extension (.wav or .aif) to the file name and attempt to open them on the PC. PCs don't deal with resource forks, they only deal with the data, and it sounds like the data contained within the files may still be good. If you can open them up on the PC, resave them and reload them to your Mac. Then use PT or another app to open the files, That should create a new resource fork. I think...

3. If they're SD2 files, append the extension, stick them on the PC, and get a batch converter program to convert them to Wav or Aiff. then re-import to your mac. You'll lose the timecoding info, but.....

Good luck!

Good call Jonesy! I completely forgot about ResEdit! Thanks for chiming in. Maybe Brodie can recover things yet!

nuclearmoon wrote: Good call Jonesy!

Well I don't hear that one too often.... But at any rate, I hope I helped, and I'm glad if I did!