iPod help

May 10, 2008 2:16 PM

So I connected my iPod Video (60 Gb, Windows formatted) to a friend's PC and iTunes wiped it clean. Is there any way I can recover my music? Please help!

When I connect it to my PC now iTunes gives me an error message saying I must click Restore to original factory settings.

If I do so, will I lose all my music forever-ever?

I enabled disk use a while back. When I browse through to the USB drive, and look at the hidden iPod_Control folder, the 'Music' sub-folders are empty! In Fact when I double-click them Windows says 'Please insert a disk'.

What do I do? Please show me some free tools to deal with this annoyance.

posted by harhailla.harhaluuossa to technology (10 comments total)

Is your music still on your computer in your iTunes library?
posted by danb at 2:21 PM on May 10

danb: "Is your music still on your computer in your iTunes library?"

no danb it isn't!
posted by harhailla.harhaluuossa at 2:39 PM on May 10

Harhallia:

danb is referring to your iTunes library that's stored on your computer. When you rip CDs or download them, they are generally kept in your PC's iTunes library as well as on your iPod itself. In fact, you'd have to manually delete the music to keep it saved. If it's no longer on your machine for whatever reason and the iPod_Control folder is empty, then your music is pretty much gone outside of the possibility of using a program like this.

Next time, you may want to ensure that your friends' machines are not set up to automatically update iPods by syncing libraries.
posted by beaucoupkevin at 2:47 PM on May 10

beaucoupkevin: i keep my music on another machine that i have no access to for a while.
the link you linked to says i must pay! please 0 please show me something free?
posted by harhailla.harhaluuossa at 2:53 PM on May 10

If your music is on another machine, then nothing is permanently lost. Your best bet is probably to wait until you can resync your iPod with it (and, as beaucoupkevin says, be wary of accidentally syncing with other computers in the future!). As far as I know there is no freeware iPod data recovery solution, but maybe someone else has one handy.
posted by danb at 3:21 PM on May 10

Basically, itunes mirrors itself to your ipod from a specific computer.

You wiped out your ipod. You want to wait till you go back to your 'itunes' computer and 'sync' it back from your library.

You really don't want to screw around with recovery software, as that will cost money.
posted by filmgeek at 3:40 PM on May 10

You can try Undelete Plus or another free file-undeletion tool - there are several.

The basic idea: When you click delete, your computer just marks those sectors as empty, but doesn't actually remove the file information written to disk. As long as you haven't saved anything to the drive, that data may still be there, and you may be able to recover it.
posted by chrisamiller at 3:52 PM on May 10

The various recovery software isn't bad, but it loses all metadata, of course, so you end up with 100's of files, often with impossible names... they're also slow to run and will not get EVERY file... which means you'll also have some missing/corrupt files to deal with. It will take many, many, many hours to reassemble your data the WAY you had it before, even if you get the actual files.

As filmgeek says, unless there's something urgent on there, you're almost certainly best off waiting and letting your other computer fix the problem 'naturally'.
posted by rokusan at 5:10 PM on May 10

rokusan: itunes tags all files with id3 metadata. Playlists would likely be lost, though.

Re-reading: from drive properties on your ipod, scan or check it for problems.

From your ipod, what's showing up?
posted by Pronoiac at 5:38 PM on May 10

PhotoRec (free software) should be able to recover the files from your iPod. I wouldn't bother with this unless something has happened to your computer with the files.
posted by PueExMachina at 9:15 PM on May 10