Windows Media Player (and my own stupidity!) strikes again!

[Xylob the Destroyer]

I've got, or rather make that had about 20G of music (mostly wma) saved on a Win2K machine in our game room.
I had shared the "My Music" folder on that PC out to the network and then mapped it as a network drive on my office PC.
Then I told Media Player that it should use the M: drive as the media library.

Now, I don't know what the hell I did, and really doesn't matter anymore, but somehow while playing around in Media Player on my office PC I managed to delete over 80% of the music files from the server PC downstairs...

I have almost all of it on CD buried somewhere, and it was probably time to re-rip a lot of it anyway as some of the files were starting to 'skip' regardless of which PC I was using to play them - even the PC they were stored on.
Unfortunately everything I had mp3 (borrowed, downloaded, etc) is now gone.

Can anybody recomend a good, FREE program that will go through and automatically delete empty folders?
I already ran a search and deleted the desktop.ini and album art files from ALL of the folders. So , "YES" the folders that the missing music was in really are empty now.

TIA!

[aedipuss]

before you write anymore to that drive have you tried a file recovery yet? some are free programs.
http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm

[Xylob the Destroyer]

I've got filescavenger, which kicks ass, but I'm not too terribly concerned about trying to recover what was lost, just preserving what wasn't.

[Poppa_Meth]

Check your media player options on all the PCs accessing the drive. Most likely at least one is set to delete files from the drive when you delete them from the library. You can set it to just delete them from the library without touching the physical files.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

Indeed, that was the culprit.

Still, anybody know a program that will identify and then delete empty folders within a specified directory?

[jagabo]

You can Xcopy folder tree to another. That will skip empty folders (unless you add the /E switch). Then delete the original folder and rename the new one.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

???

[Midzuki]

!!!

[jagabo]

Start a command prompt. Type in:

xcopy /s c:\folder\subfolder\ c:\folder\newsubfolder

When it asks "file or directory" answer d (for directory).

Substitute the appropriate drive letter and folder names. If the folders names have spaces in them you should enclose the whole path in double quotes:

xcopy /s "c:\documents and settings\username\my music" "d:\my music"

Empty folders will not be copied/created with this command.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

I found this: http://www.glaryutilities.com/gu.html