Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Help! Can I recover files after reformatting MP3 player?

Feb 22, 2009 3:51AM PST

I'm a complete idiot.

I have been having trouble with my Sansa e260 and reformatted it today -- and only later realized that I had some irreplaceable, incredibly important voice recordings on the player that had not been synced with my computer. Is there any software, anything at all, that will allow me to recover these files?

Any help is deeply appreciated. Thanks.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
File recovery
Feb 22, 2009 5:22AM PST

You might look for a file recovery utility for Windows and see if it will talk to the MP3 player.

If the Sansa file system is like Fat32 the files may not have been deleted -- just the filenames or file allocation table (?) have been changed.

Personally I would put a plea in to the manufacturer who may have a techie who can point you in the right direction.

Meanwhile do not copy any files to the player because the new filenames will overwrite the lost files.

- Collapse -
Thanks -- and a solution
Feb 22, 2009 6:50AM PST

Thanks for the reply -- in the meantime, I did find a solution and WAS able to recover my files! (jumping for joy) For others who may be in this situation, the answer I found was at

http://forums.sandisk.com/sansa/board/message?board.id=e200&message.id=14011&query.id=277388

The text of the posting at that link was: "You can try switching the unit to MSC mode, which makes it act like just another disc drive, and try file recovery software (www.recuva.com). I have no idea if it will work, but it's worth a shot."

And this worked beautifully! I had my files back in 15 minutes.