Accidently disconnected ipod without ejecting, now it only shows recent purchases. I can see 40 gig of original library but its listed as other not audio. Is this retrievable audio data or is it lost. I have no backup what can I do to restore my ipod?

Question

I accidently disconected my ipod from my pc. When I plugged it back up  I only had limited access to my library. I had over 40gb of audio data that now when I go to the summary page of my pod it shows up as other, only the audio that I have recently purchased from itunes is accessible. Is the 40gb retrievable and can some one please tell me step by step what I need to do. My collection took over a year to put together and there is no backup file.

Answer 1

"Other" is the measure of used space on the iPod not taken up by Audio, Video & Photos. This includes the iPod's library and artwork plus any files you may have copied to your iPod in disk mode. The overhead for the library & artwork data is typically 1-2% of the size of the media, e.g. for 1Gb of Audio & Video expect to have around 15mb of "Other". This information is needed for the iPod's operation and cannot be removed.
If you have significantly larger amounts of "Other", not related to files you've intentionally placed on the iPod, then these are probably disconnected copies of your media files or iPod libraries left over from failed sync operations. The only way to recover the space is to do a full restore.
If you have copies of all your media in your iTunes library this isn't a problem, but if you've been manually managing the content then you might need to try to recover the files from it first. See this post by forum regular Zevoneer on transferring files from the iPod to your computer. Some of the tools rely on the iPod having a healthy library however the manual method mentioned towards the end of the post should work regardless.
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