Hi everyone.

For a month ago or so, I was going to uninstall a program from my PC with an uninstaller program which I have never had problem with before. When I uninstalled this program I noticed that basically everything from my "A" harddrive got deleted, including all my FL Studio projects which I had put thousands of hours into. The whole FL folder got deleted as well as all my plugins.

Luckily, I managed to recover every single file which I had on my harddrive and everything is the same as before. However, unfortunately, I can not open the majority of my own projects, but still I can open a few of them. There is a error message popping up when I can not load a project, it says "An error occurred while reading the FLP file. It may be corrupted, or some plugin caused an error while opening." I have tried a lot of things to fix this problem but without any success. I have tried several FLP recovery programs and such but still, without any success.

I have no idea why I can open a few of the projects but not all of them, what is causing this problem? And another thing to mention is the fact that I did a full computer format to start over, but I still have the damaged projects.

After many hours of searching I found this post someone made for a few years ago which can be a solution for this problem, but I have no idea how to HEX edit what so ever. So if anyone have any idea, I would appreciate it! http://ocremix.org/community/topic/3458 ... d-headers/ (http://ocremix.org/community/topic/3458-corrupt-fl-file-no-problem-only-for-damaged-headers/)

I literally can not imagine to start over with all my important projects again which I have been working on since 2013, I must find a way to fix this problem. Therefore I would highly appreciate any kind of help.

Thanks in advance!

 

first thing I would try is to temporary copy/cut all external vst's to a different location and try to open them without, if this is the solution you can try putting them back one by one....
If that isn't the problem you can try a newer version of fl studio, I DO NOT know if this could help, but it's worth the long-shot.

I'm not familiar with hex editing. From what I've heard it is very hard to repair 'fallen' bits. (if not impossible) Especially not known misbehavior on image-lines part.
guys like copylefter ea. could confirm this? I dunno maybe I'm talking gibberish

 

hi Bluestone if you like send us one or two corrupted flp files
and one or two working flp files and ill have a look at them,
would be good to get them working again or at least know whats going wrong.

 

Be careful with their namings. Make sure their names haven't got any special symbols in the process of the file recovering.
I faced that once, like a few years ago when i tried to re-open some of my first ever produced projects (now i work with StudioOne). I realised that after i removed the /_} or whatever, the projects opened just fine. At least you can try it.

 

Hi and thanks for the response! Unfortunately, I've aready tried this. I removed the VST search folder in FL but the error message still came up. And as far as I'm concerned I have the newest version of FL 11 so I don't think this is the problem. I've also tried to open the projects on different computers etc but without any success... Thanks for the help though!

Hi momo! Definitely! I would appreciate it so much. However, I do not have multiple versions of the damaged projects. But I do have some working FLPs if that's what you're looking for! Would really appreciate if you could look at the projects I'm attaching to this message!

"Bass Drop F" is corrupted and is one of my most important projects. "Anjunaza" in the other hand is working perfectly.

Thanks in advance.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q7b34n598vd7yfz/FLP.rar?dl=0

What do you actually mean? I have all the files recovered and as I explained I did a full computer format after the incident. So the recovering part is over dude!

 

If you really have a Harddrive on "A", then thats not a very good idea. Both "A" and "B" have historically been used by and reserved for floppy disks.

Its a shame that you reformatted before you found out wether you had got everything back, another data repair program might well have got more data back for you.

Firstly, i'm sorry for your loss and i can understand how bad it feels when you lose everything.I destroyed almost 10 years of work one drunken, depressed night when i got tinnitus and really regretted it a few months later.

Now for my rant, which is addressed to everyone, THERES NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT THEN YOUR DATA! (sorry for shouting but this is so fucking important)

You can replace any hardware that breaks, you can replace a laptop that gets stolen, you can reinstall any software you were using.
The one thing you cant always recreate %100 is your data.

Make backups, make multiple backups. Make backups that are stored offsite, use dropbox or something similar.

Harddrives are relatively cheap now and flash thumb drives even more so, i got a 64Gb usb3.0 the other day for under £20 that i have all my personal data on that i carry with me at all times.

I know it might seem horrible at the moment but in some ways its extremely liberating having to start all over again. I found that the knowledge i had gained made it easy to recreate stuff i had done years ago and the better software i now have made what i think is better music compared to my old stuff.
It certainly made me think more about what style of music to concentrate on and rather than being stuck with a load of tunes that i never ever seemed to be able to finish, i just concentrated on doing just a few tracks that i really wanted to finish.

Wishing you the best.

 

Well, I tried multiple recovery programs and since I got back the actual projects I thought that was the most that I could get out it. And yes, I definitely learnt something from this incident. I will lways make multiple backups in the future when I'm working on heavy projects. But at the moment I'm trying my best to recover as much data from the projects as possible since I can't remember how I made certain things in the project. But I will definitely backup more in the future and I appreciate the heads up! Hopefully someone can help me with this. But we'll see. Thanks anyways!

 

You may have "recovered" the data the wrong way. It can look as if your files have been recovered, but for example, if the files were heavily fragmented to begin with, the recovered files will be corrupted. Backups are essential.

 

sorry to say it dont look good the header is gone and all the info as well
Fruity Wrapper settings, plugins used, sounds ect

This is the start of the file G9÷5ìñðèù¹×ó üà when it should look something like this,

FLhdFLdt....... fl dt\ò c 11.3

best thing is try a few other recovery programs and see if one can do a better job at getting the files back,
then back-up all your new stuff even on a cd or usb stick so this wont happen again.
been through something like this befor myself and lost alot like years of work as well,
but one thing i will say is good is the knowledge you learned over time can be used again and again,
so try not to get to up set about this set-back cause thats all it is,
all the best ok,

ps i was wrighting this of line and is sort of the same info that Willum posted
some times the only way to learn is the hard way but learn we did,

 

That might be the case but I don't know. Since I did a full PC format a week after the incident I'm not sure if it's possible to recover the missing files now. But I'll talk to my brother about it. Thanks!

I see. We'll, it really does hurt because I've put my life into these projects and the fact that I probably won't be able to remake them is heartbrokening. However, I'll see if I still can recover the projects now when I have formated the PC. Otherwise I guess I just have to move on no matter how hard it is. I really want to thank you for looking the file up though, I really appreciate it! It really means alot when people tries to help you and can confirm certain things!

Indeed Algae. I'll try to look forward and fix all my plugins and samples etc so I can start producing again. Hopefully I'll forget about this as soon as possible! However, in the future I'll definitely save everything and make backups. Everyone learns from their lessons and so did I in this case! Thanks alot for the motivation though, it truly means a lot!

 

Major letdown, Bluestone. Most of us have had something like this happen one time or another (lost files, corrupted files, new software won't open old files correctly, etc.). One of the harder parts of the learning curve. What I leaned from my experience? Save early, save often, and back up everything on an external hard drive. It feels like somebody ripped a whole in your life right now, but the projects that get re-done will be better, just not exactly the same. (I can't remember anything ever happening to my two inch Ampex tapes, but they've never been in a fire or too close to a magnetic field. Of course, that hardware is getting hard to access)

 

Bluestone I already left an edited comment the last time you responded and asked you to combine your responses into one post rather than 3. Please merge them next time because otherwise it creates more work for the staff. Thank you and welcome to the forums.