Recovering from Lost.DIR

[soloxplorer]

I've searched and found some info on this, but I'm not sure how to apply it to my situation.

Device is a Samsung Galaxy Blaze, model SGH-T769 running Android 2.3.6

I was shuffling apps to my SD card last night and my phone decided to freeze on me. After giving it some time to try to sort itself out, I restarted it to find that my apps that are on the SD card didn't register on the device (ghost icons). No big deal here, this isn't uncommon, and typically solved by another restart.

Usually when the icons appear as normal the issue was resolved. However this morning I went to load up some music and my play lists were all empty. All the apps moved to the SD card work, however I checked the directory and I've lost my 'downloads' folder and now have the typical random numbered files dumped into the lost.dir folder of the card.

I tried the ES File Manager App but I'm nervous about doing a batch rename. A lot of the search results are for individual file-type recovery methods; either jpg or mp4 or mp3 (you get the picture). My situation is I had all of my mp3 files in individual artist directories, with sub folders containing their albums, as well as having various jpg, gif, and pdf files all lumped into the same external_sd\downloads directory.

Having never done a file recovery before, will I simply be renaming the random-numbered files to whatever file extension I choose (eg. 10192 would be 10192.mp3)? If this is the case, am I left to sort out each individual random-numbered file one at a time to try to figure out it's proper file name and meta-data (such as artist, song, and album)? I have a lot of files (7.x GB), so this option doesn't sound too appealing.

 

[SiempreTuna]

Tricky.

First thing I would do is back the files up to a PC.

Actually, might be easier to do the whole thing on there.

Whatever you do, I think it's going to end up being a very tedious, largely manual process.

If you batch rename the files to say, .mp3 then try importing into the WMP (or whatever player) library, I have a feeling that would identify which are not valid MP3s. Hard to automate, unfortunately.

Move those to a different directory, rename to .jpg and try the same thing with a gallery .. and so on.

I would have thought that if the file is recoverable, the meta data would be recoverable with it (but I could be wrong). If that's the case, you might as well leave the file names as is.

 

[soloxplorer]

Realistically most of the mp3s can be sorted out another way, so the few that can't I might be able to get squared away doing it manually. Either way it sounds like I'm in for a long evening of file sorting tonight. Thanks for the insight.

 

[Thom]

Welcome to Android Forums. I moved this thread to the forum dedicated to discussing this phone.

... Thom