I know we usually use our blog to discuss developments in the world of the website development, but this week I found myself the proud owner of an ipod that was missing all of its music.
Background:
I decided to use my iPod 5th Gen as a hard drive to take some data home with me. After I was finished I removed the data using windows explorer and the iPod should have been as it was before I touched it. However when I went to play some songs – everything had disappeared. Franticly I loaded up iTunes – it showed disc space being used as "other" but still the songs were missing.
I googled around for solutions, from restarting the iPod to downloading fancy programs to recover the database – nothing seemed to work.
The Software Free Fix:
- Open windows file explorer, and turn on "Show hidden files and folders" (in Windows XP this is done in Tools – Folder Options – View tab).
- Click your iPod drive.
- Navigate through the following folders: iPod_Control-Music. Here you will see folders named something along the lines of F00, F01, F02... And so on. You will notice that within these folders are your songs, however they are randomly named and randomly organised.
- Copy ALL of these folders to your computer or and external hard drive.
- Once everything is copied over, CHECK. You want to be sure that you have got everything.
- Then select all the F00, F01 folders on your iPod and delete them.
- Open iTunes. You should now see that your iPod is no longer showing a large amount of disc space used as "other".
- Drag and drop the music you copied from your computer/hard drive onto you iPod in iTunes. NOTE: iTunes might have a bit of a heart attack if you try to do it all in one shot, so I broke it down and did a few folders at a time.
- That's IT. You should have all of your music back.
