Help! PowerBook G4 failed, rebooted but I have lost all my iTunes files!

Question

Hi there,
Please help!
I have an old PowerBook G4. I dropped it this morning by accident and it stopped working. I got it to switch on again and got to the Darwin/BSD page. I followed the advice below:
Start up in Single User Mode and type carefully:
/sbin/fsck -y
Repeat the above until it says your disk is OK. Then:
/sbin/mount -uw /
cd /var/db/netinfo
mv local.nidb/ local.nidb.bad
ls -ln /Users
This last command will give you one line for each user, plus one for the "Shared" directory, which doesn't interest us. Each user will have a line like one of these:
drwxr-xr-x 29 501 501 986 Jan 17 18:38 michaelc
drwxr-xr-x 14 520 20 476 Sep 10 2004 jdoeThe second numeric field (501, 520) is the user ID (UID) and you need to list the uids against the shortname s given in the final column. Make sure you get the name right for UID 501! Then continue with
reboot
I had to add new details once it had rebooted and it looks like i's created a new profile. I have the files that were on the HD (photos - phew) but all my music files have gone.
Any idea how to get them back please?
Thanks sooo much for your help!
J

Answer 1

Download a copy of EasyFind (free) and use it to search. It would be really unusual for a folder to go missing so selectively while everything else survived on a drive. Dropping a drive doesn't shake files loose. You posted a lot of instructions somebody had provided but how much of that did you actually need to do?
[Link to EasyFind download|http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/11076/easyfind]
It is possible you had some sort of directory damage and the files still exist on the drive but the computer has lost track of them. Try file recovery software.
*File Recovery*
General reading on this topic - [http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/datarecovery.html]
Easiest method: If you dragged these to the trash did you empty the trash? If not simply double click on it to open it and drag the file out again.
Next easiest method: Copy the file off a backup drive.
File recovery software: Try using an application such as [Data Rescue 3|http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php] or [FileSalvage|http://subrosasoft.com/OSXSoftware/index.php?mainpage=product_info&productsid=1]. Both have free trial versions that let you see if the software will help before you decide to buy. You will also need a second hard drive equal to or larger in size than your first drive as a destination drive for recovered files.
It is critical that you do not use the computer or even turn it on until you have rescued your files. Files only have the directory reference to them removed when you empty the trash or otherwise delete them from a computer (unless you use secure erase, in which case they are gone forever or can only be potentially be recovered by very expensive means) and are still present on the computer. However, their space is marked as available to any other file creation done on the computer (even done by you booting the computer) and there is risk that your files will be overwritten by the computer.
There is also this free tool which supposedly runs on OSX and does recovery of popular media and Office files. http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download I have not run it and have no idea about its functionality. It is a command line program and so is not as user friendly as Mac users might wish. [http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/27683/testdisk]
[Baby Boomer's post on file recovery utilities|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=10270140#10270140 ] - note, most of these free demos only tell you if they can recover a file and don't actually recover any files for free.
If you manage to rescue the files you should seriously consider getting a backup drive. A $100 drive will cost less than replacing a substantial iTunes library since Apple does not provide for a second download for free.