I'm using a Seagate Freeagent USB drive to store music onto. I'm having a weird problem, though... All the sub-folders in the music folder - from mid-way through 'g' and then all the rest of the alphabet - are invisible in XP explorer. However, if I manually enter the address of a folder in the bar at the top of explorer, the folder opens fine. Also, DriveRescue sees these files fine (not as 'deleted' files, but in the 'root' with the undeleted files...) The files also seem to be taking up space on the seagate drive - much as you'd expect - but I just can't sodding see them in explorer, and foobar won't add them too its library, although it will play the files if I drag and drop them onto it :grrr: View hidden/system files is enabled on my computer, and I've tried the seagate drive on another (win2k) machine - the exact same problem. XP search won't find the files either.

Any ideas as to the problem/and or solution? I've managed to get these files onto another hard drive - manually entering the name in the XP explorer address bar - but would be good to figure out wtf is going on with my drive...

TIA.

how many files/directories are on the usb drive, and how is it formatted? good old FAT(16) has limitations on it that might explain this

Thanks. Several hundred directories, and god knows how many files. But it's an NTFS drive - so I'd have thought it could handle this...

I don't think it's an NTFS related problem. Windows Explorer has a limit to how many files it can see at any one time though. You can test this out by moving, say, the first ten files to a different folder and see if ten more appear at the bottom that you couldn't see before.

If this does help then try reorganising your tunes so that they're in separate folders per artisit or per first letter so that you don't have thousands of files in the same folder. I have nearly 14,000 tracks organised in separate folders per artist on one external 500GB LaCie hard drive and Windows Explorer seems them all fine here under WinXP Home.

If you've done this already then I'm fresh out of ideas. Sorry.

Cheers, Slipstreem.

Thanks - I've shifted all the visible files out of the directory that's playing up. The invisible ones stay invisible, though....

What are their attributes? Have they accidentally been marked Hidden / System?

Thanks for the suggestion. I can't see them to check but hidden and system files are visible and they don't show up...

Try this.

* make sure your disk is plugged in and recognized
* Windows key + R
* type "cmd" (no quotes)
* type the drive letter of your portable disk followed by the colon
* type "attrib -A -H -R -S /S /D *.*"

This will remove all archive, hidden, read-only, and system attributes from all files and folders on that drive.

Edit: what do you mean "hidden and system files are visible and they don't show up"? The Properties window won't show?

Sorry, I meant that I can't see the files in the music folder - even in order to bring up a properties window. I have hidden/system files set to visible - so, in other folders, these files are visible.

cmd brings up an error message that my music folder is corrupt, and suggesting I run chkdsk. Think I may give this a shot, after the USB drive is all neatly backed up...

How about getting a Live CD Distro like Knoppix or Ubuntu and seeing if they have any problems accessing the files?

I suggest this because I had a particularly vexing problem quite some time ago (some program accidentally created so many subdirectories that the thing couldn't be removed as it had "too many characters". I used my knoppix cd to boot into linux and easily deleted it.)

I assume that you got all your files copied or had backups and are now wondering if you can trust the drive. Assuming all data is safe, run SeaTools on the drive.

Did you try the drive on other systems? My guess is some sort of file allocation corruption. Return for warranty if SeaTools finds anything and it's still under warranty. If it's past warranty and SeaTools found problems then I wouldn't trust it and I'd get another drive.

I've had a similar experience with a Seagate before. It's probably a bad HDD.

How big is the HD and how much of it is used? Partition info? I had a similar problem that manifested itself in defrag always failing on a certain file I could never find. It turned out to be a LBA problem that i only found by accident. One day I attempted to resize the partition thinking that maybe more disk space would help the defrag. PQmagic reported back two LBA errors and I let PQM fix the errors. I did not resize the drive and rebooted and suddenly defrag was working again.

Thanks - I've ordered a copy of Ubuntu - was planning to try this anyway.
Re. SeaTools - I've already got DriveManager running (no errors found). I take it SeaTools is a better diagnostic?

btw, I have tried this on another (win2k) machine.