MP3 recovery

A recent job involved a corrupted MP3 player.  On plugging it into the PC it displayed as an music player, rather than as a hard drive.  A bit of reading the manual showed there were multiple modes for the USB interface to work, and once set in the appropiate mode, I could see the device as a storage device.  As expected it was a FAT32, but 6.5GB of it's 8GB capacity was in the FOUND.000 subdirectory, as the result of a chkdsk type command.

The files to be recovered were ones the customer had recorded which were no longer visible.  The first recovery attempt was a data carve of the disk and this showed a number of files, of the type required, but no file names or directories.  The second attempt was a logical read, but this only showed what was seen directly on the PC.  The third attempt was a scan of the disk for FAT directory stubs using CnW recovery software.  Interestingly this scan came up trumps.  All the files that had been lost (and captured on the chkdsk) were found with valid names and valid subdirectories.  When recovered the complete MP3 player was much as originally configured.