The Great Hard Drive Mystery

I have a huge mystery and I need help. Two hard drives hang in the balance! Have your attention? okay...here's the story (flash back)...
I have two internal hard drives put into two acomdata external hard drive shells. They've worked for two years. I moved into an apartment with carpet (potentially important info) and got set up. I'd been having power issues even at my old place. The power cord to the drives were not giving them enough juice to spin up. The drives would try, but couldn't. I ended up buying a new power cord on ebay. I got it in the mail and plugged it in. It worked! However, it seemed one of my shells was not starting up, not even lighting up. Whatever though, I let the one shell be my life boat to get the data off these drives.
Before I transfered the data, I opened the casing, but then closed it up again (realizing I should get the data off first before I swap the drives). When I tried transferring the data there was a privacy issue so i set the drive to "read & write". Shortly after, the drive dismounted and did not spin up.
I went and bought a new acomdata external shell thinking that was the cause. To my shock, it was not. The good (yet bad) news here is that both drives are not spinning up. That's potentially good as it could mean there's something beyond the drives that's wrong.
So, what I have in front of me are two functioning acomdata shells, two internal hard drives that aren't spinning up, and one acomdata shell that's simply not working all together. I have no idea what could be the problem yet have suspected static electricity, power supply, and (which is why I post here) Leopard software blockage.
What do you think my Sherlockian friend?

Good point. It just doesn't feel right both drives dying at the same time. And obviously I don't want to come to that conclusion. Yet, I do have to rule that out at some point if no other possibility is working.
I haven't called Acomdata just yet, but I'm certain they won't give me many answers.

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The great CD drive mystery !!!

I recently decided to upgrade to a DVD writer ............ so I took out the old CD Rom drive and insert the new one (with all the correct settings etc). Started the PC up and everything was fine, games played, music played etc. Powered the PC down and on again a few times and each time it booted perfectly.
Went to install Nero 6, which came with the LG GSA4120B drive, and it crashed half way through, saying that it couldn't copy one of the files. So tried again and it crashed at exactly the same point. Thought it was a bit strange as things normally blow up when you go to run them and not just install them !!
So powered down and left it for the day.
The next day I booted up and everything seemed fine until I double clicked on the CD drive in My Computer ............... and the PC screen went black (as if on standby) ........... and the PC just died. Even the Reset button wouldn't work, I had to use the On/Off button at the back. Again and again it happened. Then it went to the next stage which was as soon as Windows started it did the same thing. I then took the drive out and put the old one back in and the same thing still happened.
The only way that I could get it to boot was to disconnect the CD drive altogether, and the PC runs fine. I've gone through Windows settings and motherboard BIOS settings and can't find anything which I would class as out of the ordinary.
So I thought I would install newer Geforce drivers to see what that would do and it still crashed if the CD drive was connected on the Secondary IDE as a Master. I thought I would try it as a Slave and the PC now boots but the weirdest thing happens ................. you can access the cd drives, play games fine, play music fine (using a CD that was in the PC when it booted) but if eject the CD tray, the PC crashes as before i.e. black screen ??!!!???
I'm at a loss .............. twenty years of PC'ing and for the life of me I can't work out the significance of the what happens when the tray opens for Windows to crash.
Please help someone ................. I been ready your forum for a few days and you guys seem to know your stuff.
PC mobo is MSI 6382e with AMD XP2000+ proc, graphics card MSI 8878 MX420.

If you search the MS knowledgebase I think you'll find how to restore the last good version of the Win98SE registry. Basically it goes like this:
1. Registry comprises 2 files which are something like system.dat & user.dat & you'll find them if you make Explorer display hidden & system files (in the root of C: I think but if not then search)
2. You should also find the same files with .bak extensions.
3. You need to reboot in DOS mode, rename the .dat files to e.g. .old, rename the .bak files to . dat & restart.
If you don't like what you get you can reverse the .old files back to .dat fiels and you are back to where you were.
All this may be too late if you have successfully booted with these problems because you will have overwritten the backups. I would suggest try a repair install of your OS, assuming you still have the CD.

I had to install a new hard drive because my old hard drives boot files became corrupted, and i want to get all of my music files off the old hard drive and regain all my play counts/ratings/playlists

Greetings everyone
as the title says, ive had to install a new hard drive and i want to transfer my old itunes library onto the new drive, maintaining all playlists/play counts/ratings etc, album artwork if possible. The old hard drive is installed as a slave drive and is completely acessible, but due to the boot files being corrupted i cannot use it as the main drive and therefore operate my old itunes. Also, my ipod no longer contains my music library as itunes synced without my permission and wiped it.
The only thing i have tried is copying all of my old music files from the old drive by selecting 'add folder to library' and then the old drive, then replacing the new itunes library.itl file with the one from my old itunes. This restores all my playlists and playcounts but when i try to play any of the songs it says that the files could not be found, and i dont fancy locating 8500 music files individually!
Thankyou for taking the time to read my post, any help will be greatly appreciated.

Ah, my reply was based on the assumption that you had a default installation of iTunes.
i.e you had all your music in the iTunes media folder inside your iTunes folder.
If your iTunes folder is so small compared to the amount of music you have, you must have a different arrangement.
This complicates you situation considerably.
iTunes can cope with moving around as long as all the music is in the iTunes media folder, not not if it isn't.
Your first step should be to get iTunes working on the old drive. This will involve editing the xml library file so that the drive letter is correct and then rebuilding the library from the xml file.
Then you will need to consolidate your library which moves everything into the iTunes media fodler. After that you will be able to use my first suggestion.
Step 1
Find the iTunes folder on the old drive and copy the two library files somewhere else so you can find them again. That's iTunes Library.itl and iTunes Library.xml.
Now open the copy of iTunes Library.xml with WordPad.
Look for lines starting:
Location
These contain the paths to tracks.
You will need to use a find/replace to change the drive letter so that it is correct.
Make sure that you include enough in the "find" so that you only change the right thing.
Maybe /c:/ and replace with /d:/ or whatever.
After that, tell iTunes to use the library on the old drive with a shift key start.
Hold down the shift key and start iTunes, keep holding the shift key until you are prompted to choose a library. Navigate to the iTunes folder on the old drive and choose iTunes Library.itl.
Then use the method in the following article to rebuild your library;
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451
Unfortunately the date added will be today for all tracks.
If iTunes works correctly after this, consolidate your library
File>>Library>>Organize>>consolidate
This copies all tracks into to iTunes media folder and could create a problem if you do not have disk space so don't do it if you are unsure about free disk space.
Check that iTunes works OK and then use the first method.
Message was edited by: polydorus

I downloaded some videos to Premier Elements 13 from external hard drive but now the external hard drive is damaged. I tried to open the videos on the organizer which it shows the video but with a yellow ? and says missing file. Is there anyway I can open

I downloaded some videos to Premier Elements 13 from an external hard drive but now the external hard drive is damaged. While setting up my new MAC the external hard drive was dropped and I have been told by an outside source they could not retrieve the files. It had 4 years of photos and videos on it. I remembered that I had downloaded some of the videos from the external hard drive (before it was broke) to Adobe Organizer 13 when I installed the Adobe 13 on my MACOS X 10.9.5. I tried to open the videos on the organizer which it shows the video but with a yellow ? and says missing file. Is there anyway I can open these videos?
Any input is greatly appreciated!! I am sick over losing the videos and had a little hope on Adobe Organizer until I was unable to open them. I am thinking it is due to my external hard drive not being plugged in. I thought when I transferred from the external hard drive to Adobe 13 that it would be there without the external hard drive needing to be attached but maybe I did something wrong.
Thanks again for any help!!!!

jnrmendonca
It had 4 years of photos and videos on it.
To what did your camera record those photos and videos - camera's internal memory, inserted memory card, other?
Any remote chance that the latter may still exist for you to use to download the camera files to your new external hard drive?
ATR

I've lost the use of Appleworks in 10.9.2. Is it possible to partition the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro and install an older Mac OS (10.6.8) on the second partition with OS 10.9.2 on the other?

I've lost the use of Appleworks by upgrading to 10.9.2.
Is it possible to partition the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro and install an older Mac OS (10.6.8) on the second partition with OS 10.9.2 on the other? I'd like to be able to boot to the older OS when I need Appleworks and few other applications that aren't available on OS 10.9.2.
Any suggestions?
Thank you for your help.

Hello again, WZZZ,
Here's an update. I was successful in creating two partitions on my internal drive, and in installing OS 10.6.6 on the second partition, as per your guidence. I now have it up to 10.6.8 with all the security updates and AppleWorks. A great thing.
Some thoughts:
• The partitioning had one hitch; it failed at first. But once I "repaired" the disc with Disc Utility the partitioning went thru.
• The partitioning took a long time in 'resizing the partition.' A few hours I think it was. Lots of progress bar watching.
• If I had it to do again, I'd size the two partitions differently. My original data was occupying about 230 Gb of the 320 Gb disc. I made the new partitions share the space, about 230 and 75Gb. That left very little available space for the main disc. I ought to have put some breathing room in there. As it is, it's an incentive to clean up all those files, especially all those iTunes files. I now have about 10% of available space there and mean to continue deleting.
So, all in all a good project that got me where I wanted to go. Thank you for your help.
Appreciatively,
wallah

HT1386 I had to replace the corrupted hard drive in my macbook pro recently, and after I did so I did a full factory software & application restore. Now my iTunes says my iPhone 5 is no longer an authorized device. What should I do?

I had to replace the corrupted hard drive in my macbook pro recently, and after I did so I did a full factory software & application restore. I had to rebuild my iTunes Library by dragging my music folders in my iTunes Media into the iTunes Application and rebuild my playlists manually. After plugging my iPhone 5 into the computer USB, it immediately recognized my iPhone 5, showing: last backups, space left on my iPhone & all options available. I then checked the box to manually manage music etc. The problem I am now having is that when I actually try to drag music from my iTunes to my phone a prompt comes up saying that my iPhone is not an authorized device. What should I do? Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!!

jrmetzger,
iOS runs on iPads and iPhones; OS X runs on Macs.
Given your situation, I’d highly recommended that you purchase a SATA-to-USB adapter, so that you can test both your old disk and your new disk externally, since it might be that the problem is due to a faulty internal SATA cable rather than due to faulty disks.

My old pc died and i have not saved my bookmarks to a file, however i have the hard drive plugged into my new PC , how do i get my bookmarks off the old hard drive into the new version of firefox??

The old laptop died, and would not charge, beyond repair . Have removed the old hard drive from the PC and have connected it to my new PC. I have found the firefox folder but cannot see my bookmarks in it. How can i transfer my old bookmarks from the mozilla folder into the new version of firefox i have installed in my new PC??

See the great user tip: https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3141 for syncing to a new device.

I I have a late 2005 power PC G5 that I want to bring back to life. I need to replace the original hard drive, a Maxtor 250 GB Sata. Can I replace it with modern drives, SATA 5-6 etc?

I have a late 2005 power PC G5 that I want to bring back to life. I need to replace the original hard drive, a Maxtor 250 GB Sata. Can I replace it with modern drives, SATA 5-6 etc?

I knew I should never get rid of my old G5's. By the way, there is a browser still supported for the PPC, TenFourFox, if you're not using it already. Go to the Floodgap website (they author it) download it for free. The only thing it doesn't support is the Flash plugin, but the browser works great. Other video types are supported. It's based on Firefox, and runs most of the plugins and add-ons. It's very fast, and beats all other browsers on the browser compatibility and speed test. That's now my default on my G5's. Firefox and Safari are no longer supported. As far as the OS, both Tiger and Leopard were solid for me. The reason, as I stated before, was iMovie. The version in Tiger with iLife was far superior to what Apple changed it to. They 'dumbed it down' for the masses. Even the newest iLife 11 on my Mac Pro quad isn't is good, in my opinion. So Leopard should be fine for you. It's a much larger browser in terms of sheer megabytes and disk space, but it's fine. As far as getting an OS disc, I'm seeing Tiger for about $45.00, Leopard for $50 - 60.00 on that famous auction site. As far as RAM, I have 8GB in my G5 2.3, but you should check Activity Monitor when you are running your apps. See how much green slice you have left (unused RAM). You might find you don't need eight. A Mac Pro will grab more free RAM than a PPC machine will. I have a hard time maxing out use of my 8 on the PPC. Not true with the eight on my Mac Pro. The OS doesn't hesitate to grab and use it. You might be OK with 6GB on your PPC. More will not make you faster, as long as you still have free RAM available. As far as backup on your resurrected machine: look for a firewire enabled backup if can. Use CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) and make a clone backup. Next time your PPC machine wipes out the hard drive, just take your Firewire drive and plug it into another PPC machine, and you can select it as your boot drive. You'll be back and running in five minutes. You can also take the physical drive out of your enclosure, and put it in your tower to replace the failed drive, and you'll be back to where you were in less than ten minutes, OS and all. The PowerMac has an 800 port, so you can do the 800 on the machine to an 800 port on your backup. A firewire 800 to 800 cable is only about $8.00. It runs nice and fast through the 800 port. I like the OWC Mercury Extreme enclosures. They use USB, Firewire 800, and eSATA, so all your options are open.

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?

Is there a way to access my iTunes Library, which is stored on a (PC) External Hard Drive, on a MacBook Air (through an Apricorn Universal Hard Drive Adapter), without transferring the music files off of the external hard drive?
In other words, because the MacBook Air only has 120 gbs of hard drive space & my old hard drive, from a Lenovo, has 500 gbs of hard drive space (and I have over 120 gbs of music), I’m looking to manage my iTunes music from the external hard drive permanently. Upon attempting to access the iTunes library held on the external hard drive the following message comes up: “The iTunes Library.itl file is locked, on a locked disk, or you do not have write permission for this file”. Is there a way to get around this?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thanks so much!

You will have to engage a split library which means you will have to start answering questions on this forum because you will need to learn a lot about how iTunes works in order not that have a big mess at the end of it all. It also won't be easy when the time comes to relocate it all to different drives.
You can go to advanced preferences and turn off organize media and copy to items to media folder when adding items to library. Next read about how to selectively consolidate items to the external drive.
Sept. 2010, Consolidate selected content - https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2589812 and April 2014, https://discussions.apple.com/message/25414357
"...selected the new tracks directly in iTunes, Control-clicked on the selection, and saw that now you can consolidate selected items." - http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20090919000326840
Remember that when you start iTunes without the external drive turned on iTunes will present you with a bunch of broken links. If you have automatic downloads enabled with iCloud you may have to turn that off to prevent iTunes from repopulating your drive trying to deal with those "missing" tracks.
If you add tracks in bunches to iTunes and want them to go to different media folders you will need to either add them by holding down the option key while dragging if the desired media folder is not the one set in preferences, or by changing the media folder in preferences. Changing media folder preferences only applies to new files added, not old ones.
Okay, I am going to stop typing because you might just reply to me, "Oh, okay, forget it," and I don't need the exercise.
What are the iTunes library files? - http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1660
More on iTunes library files and what they do - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITunes#Media_management
What are all those iTunes files? - http://www.macworld.com/article/139974/2009/04/itunes_files.html
Where are my iTunes files located? - http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1391

All of my imovie events are stored on an external hard drive. How do I backup this external hard drive? If the external hard drive crashes, how do retrieve the imovie events?

I have all of my imovie events stored on an external hard drive in order to save space on my MacBook Pro's internal drive. I currently back up both my MacBook Pro and the external hard drive using a second external hard drive via Time Machine. I have a few questions:
1. How can I be sure that the external drive is actually being backed up.
2. How do I retrieve the imovie events if the 1st external hard drive crashes?
Thank for your help!

Let me give you some thoughts. I can tell you my plan, but ultimately you will need your own plan that makes sense for you.
I do not think that your idea of having two separate Time Machine destinations will work. You can have two external drives as Time Machine volumes, but they will both back up the same data set. You cannot dedicate one to iMovie and one to everything else. They will both have everything, so you may still have a space problem.
One way to overcome this is to back up the iMovie volume by using a tool like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner. The good news is that your Event files should be pretty stable and there is no need to back them up every 15 minutes. So something like SuperDuper, which you can set to automatically backup once a day, for example, is probably fine. I am pretty sure that this would work if you kept the Projects on the same external drive. As long as Projects and Events are on the same drive, then the cloning stragy should work (but you should always test.)
Because projects change more often than events, and projects can become corrupted, I would definitely back up the Project Library to Time Machine. You can do this even though it is on an external drive. (And even though you may be periodically backing up the entire drive that contains the projects.)
Here are some thoughts on how I approach backup, copied from an earlier answer...
============================================================
Great question. I think the issue of backup is a important one, and one I always worry about since I have a lot of video footage that is irreplaceable.
For back-up, it is helpful to define the risk you are trying to protect from.
For example,
1) risk of corruption in iMovie --> I use Time Machine
2) risk of hard drive failure --> I use SuperDuper! nightly for bootable backup) and Time Machine all the time
3) Risk of theft or fire --> offsite backup
Here is what I do...
1) I back up my boot disk with SuperDuper automatically each night so I always have a bootable system.
2) I back up my original video files. For my Motion JPEG, VHS-->AIC, DV, and 8MM to DV, the EVENT is the copy I back up. (I keep the tapes, but I never want to have to import the tapes again.)
For my AVCHD high def video, I back up the camera archive of the AVCHD, but I am not currently backing up the Event files, because I would need from 4 to 8 TB to back up these events depending on whether I made one copy or two. I can always re-create the Event from the camera archive.
3) I use CrashPlan for my offsite backup. It costs less than $4 per month, and I seeded the initial backup to an external drive to minimize having to transfer video files over the Internet. I currently have over 2TB of data backed up to CrashPlan, which includes my entire boot drive, and the files described in #2.
4) All of the above is automated, so I don't have to think about it too much. If I have to manually do stuff, I tend to get behind.
You have to consider the value of total multiple redundancy vs. the likelihood that 2 or three unlikely events would all happen at once. For example, CrashPlan could lose my data. My hard disk could fail. I could lose everything in a fire. But it is unlikely that they would all happen at once, except in nuclear war, in which case, who cares?

HT1751 So what happens when the external hard drive with all of my iTunes media on it crashes??

I moved my iTunes media/library (as well as iPhoto) to an external hard drive many moons ago. It's been a great decision up until today, when the portable hard drive I was using decided to commit suicide. Is it possible to restore the lost media and library files from Time Machine, or are all of my music (and picture) files officially gone??? Help!!

If you have been doing the basics and backing up your computer, then they are not gone. They are in your backup.
Use your backup to put them back.
Mac OS X 10.6: Recovering items using Time Machine and Spotlight

My hard drive was replaced last week. The geek squad from Best Buy backed up all my information prior to replacing the hard drive. they reinstalled everything on the new hard drive including iTunes. When I opened I tunes, my playlists were missing

My hard drive was replaced last week on my macbook pro. The geek squad from Best Buy backed up all my information prior to replacing the hard drive. They reinstalled everything on the new hard drive including iTunes. When I opened I tunes, i had some but not all my songs listed. All my playlists and purchases were missing. I attempted to sync my iPod so my playlist and information would be reinstalled but iTunes does not recognize the iPod to allow it to sync.

Hello Boylen33,
I was very disappointed to read about your experience when taking your phone in to the Geek Squad for service. I agree with avm5689, purchasing the Geek Squad Protection plan is a great way to protect your investment in a product that is so necessary to our everyday lives. The agent should have known exactly what steps to make the exchange an easy, and smooth process, and I sincerely apologize for the frustrating experience you received instead.
I assure you every single post on the forum from our customers is of utmost importance to us, and we are always happy to help in anyway we can. As per the terms and conditions of your Geek Squad Protection plan, you should receive one battery per the life of the plan, and you can order it simply by calling our Partstore. As I mentioned previously, this is something the Geek Squad agent should have explained to you, or as the mobile specialist did, call them for you, and I'm truly sorry this wasn't handled in that manner causing you to waste a lot of time at the store. Using the e-mail you registered on the forum, I was able to locate the service order, and I will be documenting your experience for further training opportunities.
Once again, I am very sorry for any disappointment this has caused, and I appreciate very much you bringing this to our attention. I hope you will give us another in chance to offer you a much better experience.
Respectfully,
Maria|Social Media Specialist | Best Buy® Corporate
Private Message

G4 How Can I Change the StartUp Hard drive?

I want change the OS StartUp from the factory 10GB hard drive to the 80GB hard drive (WD800BB) I added. I am using 10.4.11 Tiger and need to upgrade to 10.5 Leopard. However, 10.5 requires 9GB free space, the 10GB factory drive is really 9.5GB. This cuts it really close. I still have the original install disks for 10.2, 10.3, 10.4 and willing to "clean" the 10GB hard drive as it only holds the OS. Any suggestions?

Go to System Preferences > Syatem > Startup Disk to make the change.
Suggestion - Get rid of the 10G HD. HDs are very cheap today. Get a larger HD, like 100-120GB.
Based on your profile listing that you have a G4 sawtooth, nbut 1.8GHz processor. I assume you have upgraded the processor speed.
The sawtooth can only use HDs up 128GB. Look at these links.
What Macs natively support large IDE drives? (over 128GB formatted)
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/action.lasso?-database=faq.fp3& layout=FaqList&-response=answer.faq.lasso&-recordID=34188&-search
How Big a Hard Drive Can I Put in My iMac, eMac, or Power Mac?
http://lowendmac.com/macdan/05/1024.html
Using 128 GB or Larger ATA Hard Drives
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=86178
The Power Mac Storage FAQ
http://forums.macnn.com/65/power-mac-and-mac-pro/246391/the-power-mac-storage-fa q/
Alternative - SpeedTools ATA Hi-Cap Support Driver: Allows the use of extended capacity ATA drives (drives greater than 128 Gigabytes in size) on older (Pre Mirrored Door) G4 and G3 Macintoshes running MacOS X versions 10.2 and later. Cost $24.95
http://www.speedtools2.com/ATA6.html
 Cheers, Tom

What's the difference between the ATA hard drive and SSD in MBP?

I'm looking to buy a new MacBook Pro and am unsure of the real differences between the ATA hard drives available and the SSDs. How would each affect my new computer? I realize many people suggest not buying these extra things through Apple for economical reasons, but lets just say I did, which would be the better option?

You don't have to give up anything for memory, that is handled by the ram...the amount of storage available in SSD is less than with a Hard Drive in large part because of the cost. You gain speed but have to be content for now with less storage space.
Of course, you could buy an external hard drive to use for bulk storage and backups, always strongly recommended. Some good drives are available from the Mac specialists at OWC, http://www.macsales.com
Those will not be as fast as the SSD but are great for letting Time Machine backup your internal storage and for use as a place to store bulk things like music or photos or videos, etc.

Can I configure my HP dv7-4165dx to boot from the second hard drive?

I have had an HP dv7-4165dx for about 20 months now. About 10 months in, the original hard drive burned up because of the placement directly under the GPU (bottom left corner, left of the touchpad and below the keys), which gets hot enough on the top side to make your hand uncomfortable. The symptoms included blue screens, troubles on startups, and finally a system message on boot that said the drive was damaged. Since it was under warrantee, I carried it to Best Buy to have the drive replaced, which took nearly 2.5 months.
Now, at about 20 months, I am facing the beginning of the exact same symptoms. I noticed that there was a second hard drive bay, away from the GPU, so I purchased the wire needed to use that bay. Now it tells me that there is no bootable disc installed (the hard disk test, in system diagnostics, knows it is there) . I am sure I can swap the drive back to the original bay and be fine but that puts me out $75 for the kit from HP (yeah, I know I may have to eat that if there is no way), but far more importantly it means that I will have another burned out drive (losing everything, again) within a month or two.
I have looked but I can't seem to find any way to tell it boot from that drive. Is there a way, or am I just out of look due to a poor design? It's been a great machine, except for this issue.
This question was solved.
View Solution.

Hi,
Unfortunately there is no option to be able to boot from the HDD in the 2nd bay in any of the dv7 series - sorry for the bad news.
Best regards,
DP-K
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Microsoft MVP - Windows Experience

The Great Hard Drive Mystery

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