iPod - Retrieve a deleted libary?

Pete.g

Hi all,

Let me explain my GF recently bought a 2nd hand ipod mini off ebay, when it arrived it still had all the girls songs on that had owned it (490 song) needless to say my gf really likes this girls musical tastes and was really happy with it.....UNTIL I GOT HOLD OF IT!

Last night I plugged it in to the pc and installed the software putting in my gf's name ect and downloading an album of mine onto the ipod. Now it looks like reregistering it in her name has wiped the songs that were originaly on there (the 490) and it's only showing 10 songs in the memory - my album!

Is there any way of retrieving the songs that were on it when we recieved it.

Needless to say my gf isnt talking to me!

Thanks,

Pete.

wolfman

Yeah Alex is going along the right lines. You'll need file recovery software. The data will still be there, it's just not referenced.

Due to the way the iPods database is written and stored the tracks will be divided into number folders, and named randomly too. You can however, with a decent piece of tagging software, rename the tracks appropriately but reading the tag information.

Sir_Bargains-A-Lot

I disagree guys (sorry!)...but the songs on an iPod don't get backed up to a PC automatically - not without the use of 3rd party software - so if they're deleted off the iPod without doing that first then Pete's stumped!

If the music was on your machine first Pete, I'd agree - but as it was only on the iPod - you're stuffed mate. Some serious grovelling needs doing!

wolfman

No, it's not what we meant.

The iPod itself is a hard drive, and can be plugged in as a removable hard drive. Any files deleted on it will only be deleted from the lookup table, just like with a standard hard drive. The clusters containing the data will still exist, they are usually deleted over a period of time by being overwritten by something else.

So taking that in mind, you should be able to run recovery software to find any files on the iPod. Much like when someone deletes a file in Windows, and empties the recycle bin, you can still recover the file.

Sir_Bargains-A-Lot

Ah - I see. Yes, my mistake - you're right, it should work like that.

Try the links on this page, Pete:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=931813&#931813

Full of programs that might do the trick...

newfoundglory

I agree. Your best bet is definitely a unix system though, possibly a mac.

The reason i say this? Because you can easily mount the iPod as a filesystem. Now, if the filesystem of the iPod is HFS or HFS+, then this is going to be easiest with OS X which is based on freebsd.

You should then be able to load sectors off the mounted disk into memory, and write them back to the hard drive.

Needless to say, i am a bit rusty on my unix, and i dont really know how HFS/+ differs from UFS, UFS2, FAT32 or Ext2/3

I suspect any commerical application for iPod recovery works along these lines.