[Simon]

forgot to add that the original inaccessible files on my media drive are still inaccessible…

all advice and input still very welcome,
simon

[Simon]

hi Valvehead, and all interested others who may be of help,

i copied the entire lot of these wav files (accessible & inaccessible) to ‘MY DOCUMENTS’ folder on my system drive and the ‘LOST’ ones magically reappeared, albeit under different/reassigned names.

all are now accessible and seem to work fine – and i am able to rename them, but will hold off until further input.

out of a total of 280 wav files, 127 were reassigned names! also know that there were a couple of word files in there that this also happened to.

here’s an example of the kind of filename i originally started with:
1997 february 27 SIDE B 00m00s – LAID BACK GROOVY FUNKY BASS LINE-MELODY

this is the kind of filename i’m getting now:
SIDEA1~1 or SIDEA2~1

what’s going on here? what should i do?

really perplexed,
simon

[Simon]

Hi Valvehead,

Thank you so much for the information.

The maxtor 250gb SATA drive in question is presently hooked up directly to the motherboard’s onboard primary (it has two) SATA channel. The motherboard is a DFI nF2 U400SG-AGF.

There are no SATA controller cards in this system at the moment.

If I’m reading you correctly, you are suggesting that I buy and install a SATA controller card to ensure drive stability and data integrity? Yes?

Is there a way to find these “lost” or misplaced files – I am still hopefull they’re in the system somewhere, perhaps under diffrent names?

I suppose I should transfer whatever files are there on another drive or burn them onto disk and reformat the 250gb SATA Maxtor drive…

many thanks,
simon

[Simon]

hi,

an update…

found this from the microsoft site dated jan 2005:
————————————————————
NTFS Naming Conventions
File and directory names can be up to 255 characters long, including any extensions. Names preserve case, but are not case sensitive. NTFS makes no distinction of filenames based on case. Names can contain any characters except for the following: ? ” / \ < > * | :

Currently, from the command line, you can only create file names of up to 253 characters.
————————————————————

i’ve counted my longest filenames and they’re in the 200 chracter range, not 240 or 250+ range.

please, if anyone has experience with this, let me know your findings. it is really disconcerting.

i’ll try to keep my filenames shorter, though i seem to be within microsoft’s NTFS safe range.

so then, is this a Vegas thing – something else?

thanks again,
simon