Is there a recovery program to undelete?

Question

THE STORY:
Basically, I had a lot of music on my computer in iTunes, and it was taking up all the memory. I had to get it off, so I bought the 80G iPod and put all of the music on it, deleting all of the computer's music afterward. Later, I went to put the music back on the computer from the iPod to make some changes with artist info and such. I was able to copy the files back on, but in the process my computer froze (darn Windows!) and basically shut down. I didn't realize that they hadn't completed copying, so I went ahead and restarted the computer and assumed they were all back there. I then hooked my iPod back to the computer, and hadn't yet added the re-copied files into iTunes, but merely left them in a folder on the hard drive. At this point I accidentally synced my iPod to my now empty iTunes. What it did was replace my iPod's files with the nothingness in iTunes--emptying my iPod completely. I was very frustrated because the whole reason I bought an iPod was to keep my music, and now all was lost. Adding the few files that had re-copied gave me back around 500 songs. Restoring the files in recycling bin gave me a new total of about 1600. However, originally I'd had about 4300. I think what happened was when I deleted the files it was too big for recycling bin so it only held a certain amount. Using a demo recovery program, I was able to locate 2700 songs or so which takes me to about what I originally had. However, it being a demo, I couldn't actually restore them. Then I thought, the iPod itself is technically a hard drive, and it would be a lot easier if I could just restore all the data lost from there. And shouldn't it be sort of floating around inside or something?
THE ACTUAL QUESTION IS:
Can I restore data when the iPod's accidentally erased, or/and is there an undelete or data recovery program available to get my songs back, or are they lost forever?
  Windows XP  

Answer 1

There are some data recovery programs on the market. I've no personal experience of them so I can't say how effective they are, here's an example: iPod Data Recovery Buegie - Recovering Songs </a
None of the recovery programs are particularly cheap so you have to decide if in your particular circumstances it's worth it to get your songs back. It may be if you have a lot of purchased tracks which you will have to pay to download again. If they came primarily from your CDs then it's most likely not as you can re-rip them.