I won.

Yes I finally crawled out from underneath the gigantic task of restoring a 40gb iPod that was pretty much wiped clean.

See, some people reading this may not know that I’ve had this 40gb iPod Photo for about 3 and a half years now. The only real panic I’ve ever had with it was when I leaned over into a ice cooler to grab a soda and it slid out of my pocket and into the ice water. It didn’t work for about 48 hours, but then it worked no problem. I’ve had some slowdown with the device before and always knew it needed to be formated, but by that time I realized it was such a gigantic task I always put it off.

Starting back at the beginning: last night. I don’t know what happen, but I connected my iPod to my PC to get some music off it and every program I used said the iPod was empty. Nothing. I even restarted my PC to try to get it to work. I ended up extracting all the audio I could off of it, but out of the 35GBs that use to be on it I only managed to get off about 70% of it at 22GB.

I don’t know what happen to the rest of the music, but it was eaten. It was really weird to start relabeling and organizing all this music only to slowly learn what was missing by only finding one track of a whole album that use to be on there.

I didn’t really do the math or look at the numbers until I noticed quite a few of my most listened to artists suddenly missing more than half their songs. That’s when I realized that somewhere I lost 13GB of music.

Most of it was stuff that was just taking up space. Others are things that are going to be impossible to remember the name of, let alone find them.

I did make a backup a while ago of some of my music on an external hdd, but that ended up only being about 3GB worth of it. I thought I had a lot on my laptop too, but it turns out that none of the stuff on there disappeared.

So, at about 6 am this morning–after staring at my pillow for about an hour–I decided to start this whole mess. As of right now I basically have my new program (seriously, screw anaPod, That program messed up my iPod more than it helped it), MediaMonkey, set up with my whole track list. I have exported it to html in case this ever happens again. I’m going to run the library program one more time to get the couple of albums that I stuck in there last minute registered, then I’m going to connect my freshly formated iPod to it like a virgin. If you’re interested I put the list up here.

So, 15 hours of this and I’m nearly done. I’ve trimmed a lot of fat off my track list, and I have a few things downloading right now that I need to add and don’t have the originals any more (or don’t feel like ripping). The things that have come out of this whole mess for the good:

-Finally found a better mp3 program that interacts with my iPod.
-Got a spare 160gb HDD installed on my PC.
-Connected up my external HDD
-…

Yeah.