File recovery issue

The_Rat

I recently made a mistake during a fresh install of windows and accidentally deleted the partition on my backup drive. Don't ask me how, it had to do with my pre-SP1 install disk being all squirrelly with my HDDs. Anyways, all the stuff is still there, and I'm trying to get at it. The only stuff I didn't have backed up was my music collection, and though I've gotten to the point where I can get the files copied to another drive I'm having trouble preserving the id3 tags and original folder structure.

Stats:
Windows XP SP3, NTFS, pulling files from a deleted partition on:

Ubuntu 8.04, ext3

I can get a bunch of numbered files that I can play properly, but I don't want to go back over 18000 songs and reenter the artists and titles by hand, or go back and re-rip all my cds and junk. So my question:

How do I recover my mp3 files and preserve the tags from a ext3 drive?

I've had the best luck with this program so far: http://www.data-recovery-software.net/Linux_Recovery.shtml

Æthelred

Aren't ID3 tags stored within the mp3 files themselves..?

The_Rat

For some reason when I pull the mp3 files off the disk they come out as just something like 435346.mp3 with all the title and artist data gone, but only some of the time. Sometimes they still have a wierd filename, but the tags are still intact.

zanetheinsane

Just run a batch rename on the recovered mp3 directory with a program like TagScanner or ID3TagIt. It'll pull all the file names from the id3 tags.

The_Rat

Ok, cool, I'm running Testdisk to pull all the mp3 files now, I'll post again when it fails/succeeds.

The_Rat

I pulled all the mp3 files that photorec could find off the drive, and ran tagscanner on them, but it only found partial tags for a few and all the files are chopped up into weird chunks. Does this mean that my files are corrupted and a write-off, or am I just doing it wrong?

bowen

Don't use Stellar Phoenix. There are better software applications out there.

http://www.getdata.com/

I've used these guys in the past, they're pretty good for their price. I've even been able to recover a whole partition that was FUBARd with bad sectors.