How i got to this situation:
I have/had an ipod 5g with approx 10000 tracks stored on it. I always use a windows pc to add new tracks from cd's that i buy, but the library on the windows pc is not up to date and contains only 8000 tracks.
i had recently backed up my ipod, to a nix machine, and started a process to get my windows library up to date, with accurate filenames etc. I had been using the ipod as a portable music library, which i just plugged into any computer to play the music via the computer's software. Two days ago, i plugged the ipod into a powerbook g4 mac. i played some music on it for a while, then ejected it. when i went to play music on the ipod as a stand alone player, it wouldnt play any tracks, and when i plugged it back into my windows pc and browsed the ipod as an external disk 35gb of music data had mysteriously disappeared.

i then proceeded to spend a lot of time googling recovery from this sort of situation. i came up with a few answers, a command line utility for linux, which i tested out and while it recovered all of the files lost, named them with totally random names. I also came across a utility for windows which was priced at over 100 dollars.

basically what i want to know is does anyone know of a utility for any of windows, mac or nix that can restore files with their original filenames and directory structure. I don't mind paying for the software, at least not if the price is not too high, but i need to know if it can get the filenames and dir structure from the device.

it is formatted with fat32.

thanks in advance for any pointers.

From a quick google, you might read this thread.

Otherwise, you might be able to use extract and/or libextractor to get your filenames from the metadata (ID3 tags) in the files you recovered, then script it to rename the files. I'm guessing the heirarchy is lost.

If you have musicman installed, you can rename all of the mp3 files in a directory based on the id3 tags from a context menu in konqueror. Some of the mp3 player programs will do the same thing.

thanks for the suggestions, but the file structure wasn't based on the id3 data, so creating new file names based on that is no good for what i need.