Usenet Explorer

I had a problem with the hard drive that my Usenet Explorer database was installed on. There are small number of unreadable sectors - the hard drive is clearly on the way out. I've cloned the entire partition minus the unreadable sectors using dd_rescue on a Knoppix live CD. One of the files that I lost was bodies\bd.01.mdb Everything else is there, all the settings and all of the attachments in the bodies\0, 1, 2, 3... sub-directories (many thousands).

However, when I start Usenet Explorer all the small article bodies and messages are missing. It appears that these are all stored in the bodies\cnt.dat file as I can see them when I open the file. The file is 95Mb in size. I have a copy of this file safe in another directory but if I copy the file into the bodies directory and start Usenet Explorer it scans all of the attachments and then resets cnt.dat to a very small size!

How do I get UE to recognize cnt.dat and re-instate all my messages and small article bodies? Why does UE keep initialising this file whatever I try and do? Is there a setting somewhere to prevent UE from overwriting cnt.dat?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Maybe the bd.mdb file doesn't match the content.

As to those small article bodies bd.mdb files contain offsets to cnt.dat along with data checksums, when restoring UE checks the article checksum, if the offset is wrong there is no article data at that offset.

If you have the copy of cnt.dat along with mdb files you can try to copy all those files. Then it will be able to see small article bodies, as to the rest of the files in the subdirectories UE will synchronize them like you saw.

In the future you can uncheck edit menu->articles->cache small article bodies, then small article bodies are not stored in cnt.dat and can be retrieved from the subdirectories if bd.mdb files are lost.

Thanks for that alex.

The problem file was actually bd.00.mdb and was sitting on a patch of unreadable sectors so there was a chunk of missing data in the latter part of the file. I put the recovered bd.00.mdb, bd.01.mdb and cnt.dat files into database\bodies and started U.E.

U.E. restored 4186 bodies and opened. I now don't appear to be missing anything! All messages and attachments (small and large) appear to be there.

The cnt.dat file remains the same size as it was before (96Mb) and is not being reduced to a very small size.

Does U.E. restore small attachment bodies and messages from cnt.dat if they are "orphaned" from the offsets in bd.xx.mdb?

It doesn't scan cnt.dat for data directly.

But again you can just uncheck the cache option I mentioned above and then bd.mdb and cnt.dat won't be used for recovery at all.