Folder only displays first 287 items?

June 13, 2007 4:52 PM

My music album folder contains ~1000 folders in it. It's stored on a large external hard drive. It suddenly began only displaying the first 287 folders, ordered alphabetically.

I tried to view the rest from the command line, but only those 287 are displayed there after a dir command. It merely says "Error" at the end of the list. But the other ~700 folders are still there, completely intact. I see them when I go directly to the folder. Their contents still play in iTunes. I can view them from explorer and the command line when I type the full name of the folder in (like F:/music/Xiu Xiu - Fabulous Muscles).

What's going on? Can I fix it? Should I start immediately backing up? I would immediately but I am graduating and moving out in a few days. Should I avoid turning on my hard drive? Help! I'm really concerned. And I'm running XP pro.

posted by anthropomorphic to computers & internet (14 answers total)

Were the folders somehow set to hidden? Enable the viewing of hidden folders and see if they show up.
posted by chrisamiller at 5:16 PM on June 13, 2007

Sounds like there might be a file system error. Back it up if possible before doing the following, though it will be difficult to back it up if you can't list the folders.

Open My Computer. Right-click the drive, and click Properties. Click the "Tools" tab, then under Error checking, click "Check now." Check the "Automatically fix..." checkbox, then click Start. It may take a while.
posted by CrayDrygu at 5:52 PM on June 13, 2007

Do you know how the drive is formatted? I remember running into something similar to this with a FAT32 drive (although it was a problem with having too many files in the root directory). If yours is FAT32 I suggest converting it.

First check for errors within your CMD:

c:\>chkdsk f:

This will tell you what filesystem it is, as well as check for any errors. If you want to fix them you can put a /f at the end of that command.

If it is FAT32 you can convert it to NTFS and keep your files in tact by using the following command:

c:\>convert f: /fs:ntfs /v /x

If all that checks out ok, then I'm kinda stumped. Is the next folder alphabetically accessable? Can it be loaded in explorer as well as under CMD? (thinking something could be corrupt in the MFT at that point...but chkdsk or scandisk should solve it)
posted by samsara at 6:06 PM on June 13, 2007

it's NTFS

it's especially weird because i'm not getting errors that i can see playing any of mp3s in the missing folders.

is there any possibility that i could hurt something by having chkdsk fix any errors?
posted by anthropomorphic at 6:44 PM on June 13, 2007

Without a backup I can't say for certain. In most cases I've run chkdsk against a corrupt index, it's been fine.
posted by samsara at 6:58 PM on June 13, 2007

chkdsk says it cannot open the volume for direct access?
posted by anthropomorphic at 7:18 PM on June 13, 2007

oh no

f:/music stuff won't open. it says i/o device error.

please help me save my 80gb music library! :(
posted by anthropomorphic at 7:21 PM on June 13, 2007

Try a /x as well

chkdsk /? for a full list of options
posted by samsara at 7:22 PM on June 13, 2007

Oh drat was a minute too late. Unfortunately at this point it is possible that you have bad blocks if that doesn't clear up after a reboot.

chkdsk /r will scan for bad sectors...but will take a long time to complete...I would suggest going in read-only for now however (not use /f) and not perform additional fix attempts.

To get your files, try the freeware program PC Disk Inspector which should allow you to access the drive directly and recover files to another drive. Once you feel comfortable with what you have recovered, run chkdsk /r/f on the bad drive to see if it clears up the I/O issue. However even if it fixes the problem, a bad sector means that the drive is on its way out slowly, and will need to be replaced.
posted by samsara at 7:33 PM on June 13, 2007

(For the disk inspector you want the File Recovery one, not the Smart Recovery...within the program select your HD, you should be able to save the entire Music folder from there to a folder on another HD)
posted by samsara at 7:36 PM on June 13, 2007

Hm. Except for the fact that your disk seems to have died, I would have guessed that there was some kind of problem with the name of the 288th folder. Some non-alphanumeric character perhaps. If your disk restores nicely you should perhaps try renaming that folder.
posted by anaelith at 9:33 PM on June 13, 2007

Most likely some corruption in the directory entry. Take a look at spinrite. It does real wonders with a dead or dying hard drive. If you do get it back up, be sure to transfer the files to a new drive. Consider this one dead.
posted by MasterShake at 10:54 PM on June 13, 2007

chkdsk says "error reading partition table"

i'm trying pc inspector. thanks so much to those of you who have replied.
posted by anthropomorphic at 2:42 AM on June 14, 2007

Seconding Sprinrite. It's not free, but it works, and will quite probably get your files back. As advised, make a backup immediately to a new drive as soon as possible afterwards.

There are some other disk recovery tools, but you can't go far wrong with Spinrite.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 3:03 AM on June 14, 2007