FAT 32 blunder

[Dead Space]

My partner unwittingly archived a project onto a brand new firewire drive that was formatted in FAT 32. He didn't realize that the drive needed to be re-formatted for Mac OS, because the drive showed up on his desktop and all the files he drug to it were copied with no apparent problems. When I tried to mount it later, the drive would not mount. The computer said that the drive contained no volumes that were readable by the Mac OS.

I was able to mount the drive in OS 9 and copy the contents to a properly formatted drive. The audio files seem to have survived, but now all the Pro Tools sessions are showing up as text files. I tried adding the .pts extension, which got me the correct icon, but now I get the following error message when I try to open the session:

Could not complete the "Open Session..." command because: Logical end-of-file reached (-39) when reading "Traveling Blues"

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get the PT sessions back to normal?

-AJ

[Rail Jon Rogut]

You're in trouble.. by putting Mac only formatted sessions onto a FAT32 drive stripped them of their resource forks. There's no way to get them back.

If the sessions had been saved as Mac/PC compatible they would have survived.

Rail

[Camilo Orozco]

Do you have the session-file-backup folder?
I had a similar situation and the files contained in the back up folder where fine.

or

Try to open the sessions with a PC and then save them into a MAC drive. You will have to install MacDrive5 on the PC.

just my .02

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Neither of those things will help.. once the files hit a FAT32 formatted drive.. the resource forks are gone... the sessions won't open on a PC unless he had saved with the Mac/PC option which changes the session file format to not use resource forks.... in which case the files would be fine on his Mac.

This reminds us of the old addage, nothing's backed up unless it's in 3 places. The backup in this case also couldn't have been verified for success before the original files were deleted.

Rail

[FajitaTone]

I used to use ResEdit to put the forks back on... but I don't know what to use in OSX. Try opening the Audio Files in Quicktime and re saving them to a different Audio Files folder.

[Doug Rider]

You can get the resource back into the PT session file by using a Mac utility called FileBuddy.

http://www.skytag.com/

I've used it for renaming files. It can also get a resource fork with the proper creator and file type back into a file.

[MikeAP]

Even if you have the Force Windows/Mac compatibility turned on and you try to launch the session on a Mac from the MS-Dos drive, you'll get that error. Protools on Mac is not happy with trying to open sessions on a MS-Dos volume.

The thing to do is to copy it out to a HFS volume and try to launch it from there. If you're using Broadcast Wave files, you should be a little better off as these contain no resource forks; all information re: timestamps, bit depth, sample rate, etc. is stored in the header in the data fork before audio information.

If this doesn't work, or if you've got SDII files, you're pretty screwed. You can use a utility like resedit or resorcerer to make new resource forks, but you have to open each file and create a few key resources that are absolutely essential for sdii's (the STR resource which holds SR, Bit Depth and # of Channels.) This can be pretty time prohibitive if you've got 100's or 1000's of files in a session. Even if you do recreate these resources, you still don't have the ddrl which contains all the timestamp info. Unless all your files start at the same place and you're pretty good with converting time stamps to samples from midnight and then converting that to hexadecimal and you know the offsets for entering it into the resource, you're up the creek.

I've had this happen with 2 different clients in the past 3 months. A good habit to get into is to format a new firewire drive as soon as you get it. You used to be able to get a drive and it would be unformatted. Apparently a lot of vendors are pre-formatting as FAT32 volumes now - I know we've gotten drives from WD, Acom and LaCie that have all been FAT32 formatted when the box was opened.

Another good thing to do is to go ahead and transition to Broadcast Wave. They support sample rates over 48k and are cross platform. Some of the standards proposed by AES and NARAS require Broadcast Wave.

[Shawn B]

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is that you may be able to open it on a pc. If you have a pc sitting around you can toss your cards in that machine temporarily . Install protools and you should be able to get the session opened. Once it is opened you can back it up to cdr's or dvdr. The issue may arise that you have already changed info on the session to get it opened on a mac.

[Rail Jon Rogut]

Something I haven't seen mentioned yet is that you may be able to open it on a pc. If you have a pc sitting around you can toss your cards in that machine temporarily . Install protools and you should be able to get the session opened. Once it is opened you can back it up to cdr's or dvdr. The issue may arise that you have already changed info on the session to get it opened on a mac.

That's not correct... for the sessions to be able to be opened on a Windows system the files must have been saved as Mac/PC compatible... which also removes their dependence on resource forks.

Rail

[Shawn B]

That makes sense. I wasn't thinking it through all the way.