movie/music files highlighted in red - can't open?

[bradk]

Hi all,

I've done the searching and can't seem to find any references, hopefully someone has some info.

I had an external hard drive problem a couple days ago, one of the partitions went bad i think, I wasn't able to mount the drive in the finder window. I used a data recovery software (Data Rescue II) to get all of the files off of the drive and load them onto a new external HD. These files are all of my music library and MOST importantly the birth of my daughter, so I'm a bit stressed about it.

The files are all on the new hard drive, I can see the date, the size, file name, extension, except that all of the files are highlighted in red and I'm not able to open any of them. For instance if I try to open a music file, itunes opens up but nothing imports, movie files say "this is not a movie file", etc.

Can anyone steer me in the right direction on how to recover this stuff?

thanks,
brad.

 

[jodelli]

Have you tried running the Quick Time app and using Open File from there to play any of them? If you can do that it could be an iTunes library hangup, which can be fixed.

 

[bradk]

Have you tried running the Quick Time app and using Open File from there to play any of them? If you can do that it could be an iTunes library hangup, which can be fixed.

Hi Jodelli,

yeah, I tried opening a movie file with quicktime, all of the files are still highlighted in red and I get this error: "The file is not a movie file."

I've been trying to figure out how to get itunes to rebuild the library as well but not having any luck there.

thanks,
brad.

 

[jodelli]

What happens when you right click and get info on one of them? Is the file size relatively correct, like approx 3 to 5 Mb, mp3 or 4 ext., etc?
I'm going to pm you also.

 

[bradk]

What happens when you right click and get info on one of them? Is the file size relatively correct, like approx 3 to 5 Mb, mp3 or 4 ext., etc?
I'm going to pm you also.

The file sizes look proper, extensions look fine, all info appears to be intact, its just that nothing will open.

b.

 

[jodelli]

Can you check your private message box under your user cp? I have to leave for a while in the meantime.

Thanks

 

[jodelli]

Ok, the files all show up with .bin extensions, which means the data is still there, but not the various formatting (.jpg, mp3, m4a).

What happened was your files were saved as a data disk instead of playable media files.

It's as if an audio CD no longer had the proper cues to know when and how to play the songs.

Unfortunately I don't know how to get all the formatting back, especially since a good deal of the possible rescues are via Windows. But you might have a look at these to recover certain ones:

http://www.afterdawn.com/faq/general_playback/how_do_i_play_bin_and_cue_files.cfm#selected_item
http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/881/how-do-i-open-or-mount-a-bin-file-without-a-cue-file/
http://club.cdfreaks.com/f48/help-bin-files-184984/
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/howto-unix-command-run-execute-bin-files-in-linux/ This should work in Unix too.

anyone else?