Data recovery from an iPod

My friend managed to "reconfigure" his iPod somehow. For some odd reason, it seems that when you install the iPod software on a new computer, the software asks you if you want to "configure" it. However, in Apple's twisted world "configure" actually means "format disk". Now, my friend has lost 7 gigs of nearly priceless pictures plus 2 gigs of music. He gave it to the Apple people for recovery but they said that they couldn't do it. What I'd like to know is whether there's any software that can do this job on a PC. The iPod hasn't been written to since the format, so all the data ought to be intact. Anyone have any ideas?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

Since it's really like another hard drive, shouldn't hard drive recovery software still work? (ideally attach it to a system that doesn't have iTunes installed). Perhaps the Apple people should have done a Google Search

My friend found a lot, if not most of these sites when he googled. What gets me though, is that the damned thing is so damn expensive. $250 for complete recovery upto 10 gig. Or AUS 100 for the same. That's insane!
What I'd really like, is a hex editor type thing that lets me search for the header and footer of the jpegs and thus recover them. Will any standard tool do? Or is the hard disk on the iPod formatted using some outlandish file format?

Cheers,
cgkanchi

I don't have too much to add... but AFAIK the ipod uses the HFS+ filesystem which I beleive that OSX uses. If you can find some data recovery utilities that will work on mac and have access to a mac running OSX, then maybe you can mount it and recover it?

This is possibly why the recovery is so expensive?

There are drivers for linux to mount the ipod filesystem... as I'm sure there are with windows too. I just don't know if the recovery utilities that work on *nix or m$ will be able to search and recover from the HFS+ filesystem. I just didn't do enough research...

Thanks phish, getting a dd image or something of an iPod and mounting it using "-o loop" should give me exactly the starting point I need to hexedit the damned thing to recover pictures. It might just be possible. Plus, who knows, this could be the start of a nice little script to recover data off and iPod :). That's how most of my programs start out.

Cheers,
cgkanchi