Man, I think I may have lost my iTunes and iPhoto files.
I'm hoping someone can help me.
Here's my original setup:
* blue-and-white G3 running Jaguar with two drives: 6 GB and 80 GB
* Inspiron laptop dual-booting XP and Debian-unstable with 30 GB drive, 18 GB of which is a FAT-32 /data partition that both XP and Debian could access
Like the cheap bastard I am, instead of simply buying another hard drive, I decided to re-purpose the 80 GB drive in the G3 for a mythtv box I was building on an old HP box.
Since my laptop still had plenty of space on /data, I decided to temporarily house my Mac files there. Booted into Debian, then created a /data/Mac directory. With iTunes, I just copied that straight over /data/Mac/iTunes. With iPhoto, there seemed to be a lot of problems, I think related to symlinks that iPhoto uses. So instead of a straight directory copy-over, I tgz'ed and also used StuffIt to stuff the iPhoto directory into a .sit archive. I then copied these two compressed archives iPhoto.tgz and iPhoto.sit over to the /data/Mac on the laptop. Yes, they are duplicates, but I wanted to be absolutely sure I could get back my iPhoto library.
There were other Mac files/documents, but the above were my two most important.
Just for fun, I setup a Samba share for /data/Mac/iTunes and was able to access it from OS X, and play my music just fine over the LAN. Except a lot of songs had to be re-pointed since (I assume) the FAT-32 partition doesn't distinguish upper v. lower case like Unix does.
==
That was two weeks ago. Never touched my /data/Mac directory in the intervening time. But I have booted into XP a couple of times during this interval.
Anyway, last night, I just noticed that my /data/Mac directory is now completely empty. But inside /data, there are these files:
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 114720768 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0000.rec
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 372080640 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0001.rec
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 139526144 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0002.rec
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 16384 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0003.rec
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 557056 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0004.rec
-rwxrwxrwx 1 root root 212992 1979-12-31 23:00 fsck0005.rec
I'm not sure what happened -- only /data/Mac was gone. None of the Windows or Linux directories in /data were affected. From some googling, it seems it has something to do with booting into XP, then when booting back into linux, it does an fsck, and this is the result. (Though I'm not sure why.)
When I do a "file" on these, they all come up merely as "data". When I do a hexdump, I don't see anything particularly meaningful in the two files I tried it on.
==
Anyway, last night was obviously very traumatic. At this point, I've accepted that I've lost all that data. I know, I know, I've learned my lessons:
* don't be cheap, just buy another hard drive
* backup backup backup!!! (I actually did try to burn this stuff particularly the iPhoto directory to CD-R, but my crappy old USB CD-R was just acting up and I couldn't get Toast or iPhoto to burn these properly, so I finally gave up)
* get rid of Windows!!
Nonetheless, in a last grasp of desperation, I'm hoping someone out there can help me out.
Thanks!
