Oh, before I begin, I think I should mention that I did search the forum first, but couldn't find anything pertaining to my question.

Okay, I have a rather large collection of mp3's (all of which I ripped from my own collection, thankyouverymuch) and lately I've been noticing that a bunch of my files have gotten all crazy.

For example, when I try to open a folder that has one of these files in say, UltraTagger, I get a message like:

"The file '01 - And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead - It Was There That I Saw You.mp3' does not exist."

Okay, fair enough. However, when I open the file in Exlplorer, I can see very cleary that, yes indeed, the file does exist, although I cannot play it, move it, delete it, or even look at the file's properties! Okay....

In case you're wondering, usually I...
encode with CDex,
tag with UltraTagger,
and listen with Winamp 2.91.

Also, I've ran a few Anti-Virus programs, ran chkdsk and defrag, and have tried to look at the files with some programs I've read about on here, like EncSpot, VBRfix, and Mr. Question Man. All of which confirm that the file IS there, but can't tell me anything else. Also, I've tried to decode and re-encode the files with CDex, but CDex can't read the files either. Go figure. Task Manager doesn't report any suspicious looking processes.

Anyone have any idea on how to restore these files? I'd rather not spend the afternoon encoding 1-2 tracks each on about 150 CD's.

I'd bet you're running into some filename/path length limit issue. If the path to the file (e.g. c:\profiles\application data\whoever\my documents\music\mp3\band name - long album title\02 - song title.mp3) is longer than a certain amount, things won't be able to open it. See if you can open it if you move it closer to the root directory or if you can give it a shorter filename.

Interesting theory! Let me try it out. I'll let you know how well it goes.

That totally worked! Thank you so much!

Path length is definately the issue. I have had this happen with 3 or 4 of my files in the past. Glad you got things straightened out.

Does this problem occur on NTFS?

I think the problem only showed up after moving my music from my laptop's NTFS partition to a FAT32 formatted USB HD. So, no, I don't think this happens with NTFS.