I have an NTFS hard drive which I've been reading/writing to on my iMac using NTFS-3G / Tuxera. The reason that it's NTFS formatted is because it came out of my old PC. Its singular function is the storage of a ton of multimedia -- MP3s mostly, with the occasional video and image files thrown in. I only recently started buying new hard drives but still haven't copied the files over -- mostly because of this problem.
One day, I started noticing that some of my MP3s in iTunes would not play, as they could not be located. When I pulled up Finder to look at the drive, I noticed that the directory where they were all stored had been transformed into a "Unix executable" file. It has the exact same name and modification date as the directory -- a few years ago, which was the last time the main directory was modified, not counting a lot of recent changes to the files inside it -- although its filesize is less than 100K. My drive is still showing the same amount of used/available capacity.
I've scoured several spots online but wasn't able to come up with a similar scenario. Just to reiterate the details:
- NTFS drive being read/written to using NTFS-3G/Tuxera for Mac OS X
- iMac uses 10.6.8 at the time the error first occurred
- Drive shows that its free/used space is the same
- Phantom Unix file has same name and modification date as the directory
Before I break out Data Rescue, which is my next step, I was wondering if there were any other steps I could take, or if my drive is borked and I might as well just reformat it... Any suggestions?
chkdsk
on Windows might help; it's a Windows native filesystem after all. (Then again, it might destroy the folder completely while "fixing" it.)