windows ipod automatically reformatted

[abd al-wadud]

Friends visiting wanted to upload some of my photos onto their PC-formatted iPod (80Gb) that they have been using as a photo storage device while they travel (it has never been used for music). I plugged it into my G5 iMac, whereupon iTunes started up and a dialog box saying "Optimizing your iPod for Mac OSX" appeared which I could not abort or escape from.

When it had finished (after 5 mins and a lot of iPod hd activity), the iPod appeared on the desktop. It appeared to still have the photo files, that had been uploaded direct to the iPod from their cameras using Apple's camera adapter.
But the JPEGs no longer worked - the files were there and take up over 1 Gb on the iPod, but they do not display on the iPod or open on my iMac.

After more investigation it appears iTunes has simply reformatted the iPod from FAT32 to HFS+ format - without asking - and somehow without deleting the files already on the iPod. However these files are now corrupted, and will not open even using Graphic Converter.

My friend even called Apple tech support in Australia, who said that iTunes was not at fault since the iPod had apparently been configured to auto-sync with its PC laptop in Australia. Er - so plugging such an iPod into any other computer auto-deletes the contents? I think users should be made more aware of this!

I've tried some picture recovery programs (MediaRECOVER, PhotoRescue, Picture Rescue, Stellar Phoenix Photo Recovery, DTI Digital Picture Recovery) and some JPEG repair programs (JPEG-JFIF Repair - didn't even open, and aaw.mo.X - fairly incomprehensible instructions, didn't seem to work but it's so dense I couldn't be sure I'd done it right). The photo recovery programs managed to find the odd intact photo, perhaps 10 out of 500-odd. I even tried opening the JPEGs in TextMate and trying to paste in missing header information taken from other JPEGs, but this was somewhat random and a last desperate act. At this stage it was 4,30 in the morning and I had to admit defeat.

Is there any way of recovering the photos, since these are the only record of a once-in-a-lifetime trip?
Any help would be most gratefully received...

PS they flew out of here this morning, so I no longer have the affected iPod, but I have taken a copy of the corrupt files in case anything can be salvaged.

[artov]

I cannot help you. However, when I tried Windows iTunes on my Mac
formatted IPod, it tried to do the opposite, i.e. to format it as FAT32.
Luckily the message was somewhat cleaner, so I could stop it.