Copy files from a damaged iPod

Feb 28, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: E1ven

While there are about four dozen programs for copying songs back off of your iPod, not one of them works correctly when there are starting to be hard drive errors on the iPod. I learned this the hard way this weekend, when my girlfriend reminded me that I still hadn't uploaded her music after a hard drive crash a month ago.

Well, given that OS X has a BSD layer, I knew I could pull something off. It turns out that when trying to copy a file that is bad from an iPod, the kernel puts the process into an uninterruptible state, which means that it'll just hang ... and hang ... and hang. Luckily, OSX ships with dd, so we were back in business.

Here's the script I wrote which got her music back; it worked quite well for me, but no guarantees.

[robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]

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