iPod internal harddrive?

[lite12]

Unfortunately the internal harddrive for my iPod has accumulated some serious errors on it, leaving about 18Gb of material stored on there out of my hands.

When I hook it up as an external firewire drive as usual, it appears as an unformated drive and asks if I would like to format. The drive itself and the data on it seem alive, the iPod OS still runs, but it gives a "bad folder" error when I try to seek for songs.

Is there a (hopefully painless) way of getting the data extracted from the drive before I reformat it?

Thanks for any help,

-Lite

[lite12]

I decided to use R-Studio FAT to scan the dead drive and recover the files. (If anyone else has a better idea let me know)

I can scan and successfully locate the files, but when I try to recover them... I don't know if I'm chosing the settings wrong, but the files are "successfully" recovered, yet full of absolute gibberish when I open them. I've never used R-Studio before, so I have no idea.

-Lite

[theMonster]

there's an ipod tool out there to dl from apple that'll reformat the drive and reset stuff back to factory default. I had to do this when I reinstalled xp, because it wouldn't authorize. The files are hidden. You should be able to open the ipod as a hd and select to view hidden file and folders and be able to cut and paste from the ipod. There's full instructions for this stuff in Apple's ipod support forum and they're REALLY good at answering questions.