Drive Errors

[fdpugh]

I'm getting mp3 driver errors and tons of "error reading sector" messages.

This is an iPod I'm kindly trying to recover for someone - media files are media files and a hard drive is simply a storage bin yeah?

I was able to find about 400 files earlier, but there are supposedly 3000+ songs pictures, and movie clips. I really hope I can get these back.

If these are sector errors, will I have to figure out how to map this drive and use another utility to error check the drive, or is there a significant difference in the FAT format used by iPods that regular PC drives don't have?

[GDH]

Hi,

What happened to the ipod? How were the files lost?

Usually the best type of search to recover deleted ipod files is as follows:

Please download Recover My Files from Data Recovery Software to Undelete Files; Disk recovery; Recover Deleted Files or http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe.

When you plug in your ipod - do not let itunes run or it may try and write new data to the drive. Close it down immediately, or if you know now, before you connect your ipod, put it in "disk mode" so that your PC only sees the ipod as a drive letter and not as an ipod.

1. Run Recover My Files and select "Complete Format Recover". Click Next.

2. In the drive selection window, put a tick in the selection box for the "physical" iPod drive (you can identify which one it is by the displayed size). Click Next.

3. In the File Type selection window, leave the default file types selected (.bmp, .jpeg, .xls, .ppt, .doc, .pdf, .zip, .wav) but also add under the MultiMedia group also select "iTunes Audio File" and "MP3 Music File". Start the search.

At the end of the search look in "Folder View" for your recovered files. You should find them in a folders called "iPod Controls > Music > F00, F01, F02 and so forth. These are your music files. They are not organized in a any particular fashion within these folders (you can organize them later).

When you find what you are looking for, put a tick next to the file or folder to mark it to be saved (you can see the total number and volume of files selected in the bottom bar of the main program screen). To select groups of files, hold down the SHIFT or CTRL key, highlight the files with your mouse, and then press the SPACE BAR to turn the ticks on (or off).

4. From "Folder View" of the Recover My Files results screen, save the contents of the "Music" folder to your hard drive or whatever other device you choose.

5. After you have saved the files your files from iPod into your Computer you can see that all files are labeled with 4 letter file name. You cannot understand which file is for which Song because all information is hidden into the file. But do not worried about that because you can play them in Itunes, Winamp, Windows Media Player or QuickTime and then you can see all information such as Album Name and Singer.

Once you have the files saved on your computer, you can re-import them into iTunes using the "File" or "Folder" > Import function in iTunes.

[fdpugh]

I don't know exactly what happened with the iPod - my friend said she got her self a new notebook for christmas and decided to dock the iPod. Not having used that computer to transfer music before, iTunes of course over-wrote the iPod... I didn't figure it would be a huge problem, until she told me she decided to put some new songs on. Still shouldn't be a real big deal - just over wrote some of her old data; hopefully not stuff that was precious/irreplaceable.

I don't have iTunes... I don't even have an iPod, so I'm not sure what the peculiarities are (if any) and am simply treating it like a peripheral drive.
Obviously my PC side of things will not be trying to run iTunes on connect; I'm not sure what the iPod firmware tries to do.

I first tried to use Acronis Disk Director to simply recover the old partition and check for drive errors. It found the new partition and no errors.

RMF finds numerous cluster errors. I was going to try and use a disk checking utility (VoptXP 8) to analyze and recover the sector errors and cleanup fragmentation of the MFTs, but I can't map the iPod as a drive on my machine - is this where disk mode comes in? How would I set that up?

RMF claims to recover lost and reinstalled partitions, so I am assuming that is is simply scanning the physical disk for imprinted file information rather than referring to any existing MFTs to tell it where things are - because if the old MFT is damaged or partially overwritten, then of course I have a problem.

I ran the full format as suggested and picked up 578 files - about 2 Gig.
I did not scan for the music files on this pass - only the default files and O/S items, although it did recover quite a few mp3, and itunes files.

I am saving the files I have found - will subsequent passes be able to pickup more of the lost files now that it has a basic map of the file allocation?

Thanks for a fast reply

[GDH]

Recover My Files allows you to search a problem drive, locate the files on it, and then save the files to another drive. It does not "repair" the drive being searched - avoid any software that does this, because if you change the content of the problem drive you can easily make things worse.

The iPod drive is more likely to have a FAT32 partition than NTFS.

The instructions I gave you are designed to locate the old partition records so that the FAT/MFT can be rebuilt and displayed in "Folder View" of the search results screen. What did you find in Folder View - you should see the file and folder names and structure.

When Recover My Files finds a file called "Recovered_FileType_x" it means that it has been found by locating the file header and footer on the disk. Because music files are usually larger files, they can often be fragmented and these file may not be the complete song.

[fdpugh]

Okay... passing on the find/fix errors utilities. Could she have done bad things to herself by reloading new music - and therefore creating a new MFT over the old one?

[GDH]

Hi,

Yes, writing new data to a problem drive will overwrite and destroy old data.

[fdpugh]

:cringe: *How* bad? Is this unrecoverable? I tried scanning the iPod in disk mode and it found nothing. I'm rescanning one more time in its "regular" mode and hoping I can at least pull off a few more of the image files for her. Seems the iTunes are corrupt (files written with 00 hex as in another thread).

It would seem to me that while she had over 3000 songs and pictures, etc. Writing about 250 new ones wouldn't wipe out ALL that old data.

Do I have a prayer of recovering these for her?


EDIT: What causes the error reading sector messages? In all other maintenance operations this indicates to me a badly fragmented drive.