[mellofello808]

Hello all.



Long time reader , first time poster.

Sorry if this post is long I just need to vent a bit, and hopefully get some advice.

Wow the past three weeks have changed my mind about Apple customer support.

Story:

For a few months now whenever Itunes would hit certain songs, it would begin to skip, and then the little carousel would start to spin. Eventually my computer would freeze, and need a restart. In the same period my 30gb Ipod photo began to crash whenever I had it on random. (in hindsight I think it was the same issue) This got progressively worse as time went by. More tracks made Itunes freeze, and my 30 gb Ipod became unreadable.

Fast forward to now.

Both my itunes, and I photo will not even open at all. When opened they come up and instantly crash my computer. My Ipods are rendered useless, because Itunes wont open. Evey Apple product I own is malfunctioning simultaneously and I am pretty pissed.

All other programs seem to function as normal.

I have been to the Apple store 3 times for this (each time requiring me to take off of work and wait 3-5 hours), so far they have offered but wrong advise, condescending statements, and bad attitudes.

Upon their advise, I have

Done a disk verify, booting from the external hard disc. This passed.

Ran a program called drive genie. Got a million errors "overlapping data" or something to that effect.

So the last time I was there a rushed, flustered, and rude "genius" told me to back up what I can and, then to reformat my macbook pro. "But what about the impossible to find music that I will lose?" I asked. His answer was for me to just re-steal it all from Limewire like I originally had...

Ok I'm no angel but 90% of my songs are all legally purchased tracks. I really didn't appreciate him inferring that I had stolen all my music. This would not be a big deal since I did purchase this music, and should have the option of reripping each cd. however my entire CD collection was stolen two years ago in a burglary so I will never get these back.

So I took the geniuses advise and completely reformatted my computer. Going one by one through the artists and backing up what I could but losing roughly 1 in 4 songs. It sucked majorly.

After bringing it back to factory settings I re-import my (much smaller now) music library and the same thing is happening. My Itunes will instantly crash upon opening.

Is there anyyyyyything I can do? My music and pictures mean the world to me, and I am now going on three weeks without them. The prospect of losing them is killing me.




As an incentive for your help, any good advice gets repaid in Jessica Alba pictures



Thanks in advance.

[Sherman Homan]

I had the answer to your problem, I have run into this before and it has always worked! I have saved thousands of songs and thousands of dollars! But then I saw that picture and I forgot...
Sorry!

[CharlesS]

Try Data Rescue II. If the files can be recovered from your hard drive, it's the best bet to do it.

Windows/Mac Hard Drive Data Recovery Software Service, File/Photo Recovery Software

[mduell]

Since you reformatted you've already lost that 25%. That was a bad idea.

Boot off an external drive, copy all your important data to that external drive from the command line (command line tools tend to be a bit more robust than the GUI). Now get the hard drive in your MBP replaced.

Depending on the value of the data remaining on your drive that you weren't able to copy now, consider buying data rescue software like 'Data Rescue II' or a data recovery service like DriveSavers ($$$+).

[Cold Warrior]

I can hardly understand your post. Be more descriptive in the problems you had, the steps you took, and if you have a backup of your important data (this still wasn't clear in your post).

[mellofello808]

Thanks for the replies guys.

So far the steps I have taken.

1.Used apples disk utility to verify permissions, and check the disk. Initially this failed when I booted from my mac. However when I went to apple, they booted via, a external drive and were able to get it to pass.

2.Went back to Apple, and they ran a program called Drive Genie, which I believe is similar to Disk Warrior. The "genius" was not keeping me appraised of what was happening. From over his shoulder I could see that the program was coming up with what I believe were overlap errors (sorry I am not very proficient with computers, or the lingo associated with them) . After a few tries, the tests all failed.

3.Completely reformatted my Mac. I went through my music dragging and dropping files one by one getting some to copy to my external hard drive, but 25% gave me error messages that they could not be copied. My photos also gave an error message when attempting to copy the entire Iphoto library, but transferred fine when selecting just the modified, and originals folders.

So I do have a copy of what is left of my music, and photos.

After reformatting, my mac was running like a champ. Way faster then before, and Itunes was responsive. That is until I imported my music, and Itunes started to try to "determine the gapless playback" of my tracks. It froze on the 100th track and hasn't opened back up since. Iphoto was similarly responsive until I put back the data. All other programs run without a hitch.

So do you think that, reformatting was a bad idea and will make it harder to fix my data? I wonder if by backing up the corrupted data I made it impossible to recover? Or could it be the hard drive?

Dunno I'm lost.



as promised

[Sherman Homan]

Overlapping files happen when the Mac gets stupid and tries to write more than one file in the same place on the hard drive. The result is unusable files that can usually not be recovered. Reformatting should have fixed the underlying problem. I don't have any idea why iTunes would have run into a problem during the import... It is sadly possible that your back up data is damaged.