StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A friend asked me to recover music files from an old mp3 player he has, due to the fact that the hard drive is finicky. When I try turning it on, it takes about 5 minutes before the thing can actually read its own hard drive, and a few tries to get Windows to recognize it (as most of the time when I plug it in, I bluescreen). Now I finally have Windows recognizing it and am well on my way to recovering the files, but when accessing a few of them I get from Windows: "Cannot copy <filename>: The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error." And when trying to copy files subsequently it has a recovery period of 5 more minutes. Not to mention clicking a file in Explorer makes me wait one minute more.

I know alot of you are going to tell me to give up, but I want to consider other options before telling him that it's simply impossible to get those certain files off. I've been thinking of disk recovery programs, like http://www.grc.com, but SpinRite doesn't look like it would recognize a USB drive. Any better ideas?

What type of MP3 player does it come from? Many players have DRM protection built in to prevent you from copying songs -off- the hdd.

General Zod wrote:What type of MP3 player does it come from? Many players have DRM protection built in to prevent you from copying songs -off- the hdd.

Archos Jukebox 20, hard drive player. It definitely is not DRM-protected, since I can copy most of the hard drive off with no problem.