Tech-Strut/Recovery-Strut halp

[Duderonomy]

So around Christmas I did a disk clean-up and must have ignored the message asking if I was sure I wanted to delete files that might have an effect on current programs, because the next time I opened Ableton, a bunch of my live sets aren't working (not all of them, strangely).
I found this tutorial on yootoob
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhWbSM-630E
which seems to be fairly straight forward, but there are two things he talks about that I don't understand:

(1) I need to create a partition for the file recovery to work. How? What is?

(2) at 02:50 he talks about making sure you are searching the correct partition number. Maybe once I've created a partition this is obvious, but how do I know which one to search?


Yeah, I know, always back-up your back-ups, especially before doing anything that might make changes to your computer :WHYMUSTICRY:

 

[SPlDEY]

Duderonomy said:

So around Christmas I did a disk clean-up and must have ignored the message asking if I was sure I wanted to delete files that might have an effect on current programs, because the next time I opened Ableton, a bunch of my live sets aren't working (not all of them, strangely).



Hey brotha,

To answer your 2 questions:

I need to create a partition for the file recovery to work. How? What is?
In that video he has his hard drive already partitioned for his own reasons.

C: D:, and F:

You won't need to create an additional partition to use Photorec.

(2) at 02:50 he talks about making sure you are searching the correct partition number. Maybe once I've created a partition this is obvious, but how do I know which one to search?

The additional partition that he created he named "test" to indicate that was the partition to search. You can see that at about the :30 mark.

Essentially you are trying to recover files that may have been deleted by Disk Cleanup. According to the Ableton site you might not need to do that at all. They give you one method to recover a temp version of the live set, and also state that they might be able to repair the broken sets for you.

"In certain cases it might be possible to restore a temporary copy of the Project file in one of Live's crash report folders."

https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209773445-Corrupt-Live-Sets

If you do in fact need to recover a specific deleted file I would recommend trying Recuva - https://www.piriform.com/recuva instead of Photorec. A much better GUI for recovering files.

- Damo

 

[Duderonomy]

Thanks for the advice Spidey.

Whatever I did has resulted in trying to open certain Live Sets crashing Ableton. They appear greyed-out in the recent sets menu, but if I scroll through my files in Ableton I can go into Manage Sets and Ableton recognises all of the songs that should be there, and if any samples are missing, but thinks all of the song ".als" files are external. Using Save & Collect to bring them back into the set seems to work, but upon completion Live crashes again.
I used that Recuva program to search for missing files from the Project Folder in Windows Explorer, but it still doesn't help.

 

[Duderonomy]

Problem solved.

I had a back-up on an external HD, but had copied the Live Set back to my laptop and tried opening it, and Abelton decided that was the same Live Set it didn't like, and wouldn't open it. When I tried opening the back-up Live Set remotely from the HD however, it opened fine, and everything was hunky dory.
I renamed the set, saved, all good.
Then out of curiosity, I tried opening the original faulty set (on my laptop) again, just to see if it was still crashing Ableton... and that suddenly decided to work too!
Always back-up, and if it ain't broke, don't run a disk clean-up.

 

[SPlDEY]

Sweet. Glad your up and running!

 

[Duderonomy]

Thanks a lot for your advice. At the time I was buggin' out!