**** ME. Help me software wiz, you're my only hope.

ok, hail mary here. if anyone in here can help me fix this problem, you are about to be my favorite person in the world, and i will tell of your wizardry all over social medias and shit, which of course is the most valuable currency known to man.

my platform: MPC 2KXL w/ internal zip drive.

my catastrophic problem:

so i attempted to back up my most recent zip disk onto my desktop, for reasons we won't go into here. i plugged a 100mb iomega external USB zip drive into my mac pro, and inserted the zip disk. as i was pulling folders over to the desktop, i got some errors due to the fact that the mac was reading file names weird. whatever, i skipped the files it wouldnt read, and kept going.

but when i reinserted that same zip disk into my MPC, a bunch of the files somehow got automatically re-named, and re-formatted. so a bunch of random files now end in "....rC.SND" or "...rC.PGM". and none of the files that got re-formatted will LOAD. at ALL. i am also not able to rename the files. i either get the error "wrong disk", "wrong format", or it will crash the MPC OS outright.

this is like the last 2 weeks' work, all on one disk. this is really bad. is there any way to salvage this situation? can these files be saved? thanks for any help.

yeah apples put crap onto disks too...

I think maybe you need a windows machine to fix it (with probably windows xp)

the thing is, if names are over 8 characters long, often computers will alter the names to fit the 8 character rule... which doesn't actually apply inside the mpc.


Also, you use a 2000xl if I remember from a couple years back when you had an issue... anyhow I think maybe popping in a cheap cf card reader will be of much help. it is way more reliable than zip drives..

what you need to do perhaps will be if possible... is to fix the names of those files on a windows machine, and then load all stuff manually and perhaps you will need to rebuild the songs from scratch. probably the samples are all still fine and not messed up.


worst case scenario you might be able to open those SND or wav files in a converter program (maybe awave?) and that might let you salvage the samples..

always save your files as 8 characters or less.
what the computer did was it read every file like...
filename1->filename
filename2->filename
filename3->filename...
etc
and it just overwrote the file every time you said ok...
it will corrupt all your data for sure.
not to mention macs leave a bunch of nonsense on the disk.

load it up in xp and see what happens. you can use virtualbox and an old xp disc to install xp in a window on your mac.

the instructions get a little more involved after that, and i'll do what i can to help, but your files could just be screwed.

to improve you can...
stop using zips.
make multiple backups.
save yer files as < 8 chars.

tapedeck wrote:always save your files as 8 characters or less.
what the computer did was it read every file like...
filename1->filename
filename2->filename
filename3->filename...
etc
and it just overwrote the file every time you said ok...
it will corrupt all your data for sure.
not to mention macs leave a bunch of nonsense on the disk.

Why did it overwrite anything on his Zip?

He was copying from the Zip to the desktop, it wouldn't have overwritten anything on the Zip, any overwrites would have been happening on the Mac desktop.


Macs create additional second files, the filenames start with a ._, that are hidden on the Mac, but are visible on Windows. These hold the HFS extended attributes, and used to hold the resource fork.

Maybe you are trying to load these files, instead of the actual files? Can you scroll down to the bottom of the file list, to see if the real files, the filenames of which have ._ as the first two characters, and see if your files are actually there?

What do the filenames look like if you view it on the Mac again, do they look screwed up when viewing the Zip on the Mac?

Like what Simon said.

If you try to drop MP3s from a Mac onto a cheap MP3 Player then it seizes up. There's all these ._DS files, which I think are additional Apple HFS info for the actual file.

Years ago I had this headache with MP3s and found some free software out in networld which removed these files before ejecting. Forgot what it was, but a little searching might turn up something.

LZ Roberts wrote:Years ago I had this headache with MP3s and found some free software out in networld which removed these files before ejecting. Forgot what it was, but a little searching might turn up something.

BlueHarvest, maybe?...

http://www.zeroonetwenty.com/blueharvest/

SimonInAustralia wrote:

tapedeck wrote:always save your files as 8 characters or less.
what the computer did was it read every file like...
filename1->filename
filename2->filename
filename3->filename...
etc
and it just overwrote the file every time you said ok...
it will corrupt all your data for sure.
not to mention macs leave a bunch of nonsense on the disk.

Why did it overwrite anything on his Zip?

He was copying from the Zip to the desktop, it wouldn't have overwritten anything on the Zip, any overwrites would have been happening on the Mac desktop.

it has been a while since i've made this mistake, but consider how it would try to display multiple files with the same name in the first place. in my experience, that is enough to corrupt the data...just touching them with the other operating system because it tries to truncate the names and corrupts all the data.
then yes, copying is a second step that would screw it up further.

the file overwrite and data corruption happens in two steps, i just made it all sound like one in my original post.