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HELP!!! Please


Scot Meyers

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I took a bad virus back in May. I lost everything.....

EXCEPT on my SD card I have the entire display that runs on the mp3 show director.

I put the sd card in but i cannot get the sequence editor to run the .seq files.

I took one file and renamed it as a .lms file but nogo the software would not load it.

Is there a way to convert the .seq files so that i can reloade them to the sequence editor or am i out of luck. please help!!!

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Scot,

File on the SD card is a completely different format from the file on the PC. We do not have software to convert back from SD format to PC format.

Sorry.. Dan

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Scot,

I think your pretty much 'up a creek' in terms of getting back to your sequences from the SD card. I would go back and pursue getting the data recovered from that old hard drive, whether it has windows on it or not. In fact, I would take that drive and hook it up to an existing computer and then try to find and recover your sequence files. If you never reformatted it, it should be easy. If you re-used it ... it get a lot more complicated .... but you could still have a chance.

I lost files early this year and even reformatted the hard drive (using long format, not the quick variety). I had then even installed XP fresh over it. Then, about 2-3 weeks later ... I realized I had lost lost my controller power spreadsheet I had worked so hard on. That was easily a weeks work or more, down the drain.

I found a program which actually located the files on my hard drive and was able to restore my controller spreadsheet ... after some trial and error.

So if you are total dire straights, there is a program (or 3) that can possible help you, if you have a hard drive that used to contain your sequences. It is a hit and miss, trial and error kind of effort ... but probably worth it for you.

The company has you purchase recovery credits ... so like 1GB was around $30 I think. It was so-o worth it, I can't tell you. You can try the program for free and if it finds something worth recovering, thats when you purchase the recovery credits to make it happen. I still have a credit with them, so I can recover other things in the future using that credit. Its a pretty interesting (and smart) model they use. I was so motivated, heck yeah I paid $30 in a heartbeat.

I'll try and find the name of it for you, if your interested. I tried about 10-15 programs ... over 3 days ... and this program was the only one that found my files. Mainly because I had reformatted and reinstalled windows ... the old files were trashed, but I lucked out because the spot with my excel file had been left fairly intact.

I believe this was the software I used:
https://www.binarybiz.com/vlab/windows.html

Scott

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too late I thought i got all the files off before i wiped the hard drive clean to remove the virus. It looks like it will be a totally new display this year .

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Scot Meyers wrote:

too late I thought i got all the files off before i wiped the hard drive clean to remove the virus. It looks like it will be a totally new display this year .


You do have the SD card, which does have the sequences in a format usable by the MP3 player, no? Why can't you build a new SD card, using any of the old sequences you want to keep along with new SD format ones generated this year? Not ideal, but would avoid throwing away everything.

I've not build a SD card yet, but I would imagine something like this might work:

1) copy the desired files from the old SD card to a temporary directory.

2) Build a new SD card with a new show, pointing to new sequences and old sequence names (may have to create 'dummys' for the old sequences depending on how the SD creation program works).

3) copy the old sequences selected to the new SD card (replacing dummys if you had to use them)
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John Hertig wrote:

[snip]

I've not build a SD card yet, but I would imagine something like this might work:

1) copy the desired files from the old SD card to a temporary directory.

2) Build a new SD card with a new show, pointing to new sequences and old sequence names (may have to create 'dummys' for the old sequences depending on how the SD creation program works).

3) copy the old sequences selected to the new SD card (replacing dummys if you had to use them)



If modifications to the sequences is not required then this will work. Often people do either add a few channels or move something around each year which in turn requires some changes to the sequences however, depending on circumstances, this does provide a potential migration path.

This is a good suggestion.
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I still think recovery of his old .lms files is possible. But, it is very time consuming to find them from the recovery program, since the names are likely garbled.

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taybrynn wrote:

I still think recovery of his old .lms files is possible. But, it is very time consuming to find them from the recovery program, since the names are likely garbled.


There is a chance but the more the harddrive is used the less likely it will be. He reformatted (most likely a quick reformat) so the data would still be on drive UNTIL file system decides to overwrite those sections. Once that happens (and the longer the drive is used the more likely it will happen) that is the end...

Dan
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I agree with what your saying Dan. By the way, its great to have you back! ***

The reason why I have increased hope for Scot and his file recovery chances ... is that
I later discovered (after talking with Scot on the phone) that he hasn't used the computer since the incident in May ... so when I heard that, I thought his chances were a lot better for recover, as his system activity was very small. I recovered all of my files even after using XP for 3 weeks, to my amazement. The trick was finding the files with the trashed file names ... maybe I got lucky and found the needle?!

He tried to find the files using the software I suggested, but couldn't find a similar sounding filename match on any file in the several hundred directories he had to manually search. I was hoping he'd at least find one of the files with part of the original name intact. One different is that his names were a lot shorter than mine ... so even after the full format, I had portions of my file names that I could identify, since no all of the filename was trashed.

Maybe folks should begin a grass-roots sequence (backup) exchange with each other, so that every member has a trusted member friend who maintains a backup of another members LMS and audio files for them.

I also highly reccomend the (free) Foldershare add-on from Microsoft (gulp), which allows you to share folders (like your sequence folder) across machines quite easily and transparently. https://www.foldershare.com/welcome.aspx

*** Dan, I'd be curious what you think of my tagging ideas for S2 on this thread:
http://lightorama.mywowbb.com/forum72/16964.html

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I don't know much about the Show Director SD format. I know from another board that someone talked about either retrieving or coping different formats (LOR, Animated Lighting, Vixen) using Xcel.

I couldn’t find it on the other boards, but wanted to mention it.

If you want to email me with the files from the SD card I can try. Also, I work with a guy that does computer forensic for the FBI that might be able to help.

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