MyGig Music Recovery

If your MyGig system can't find your music, its likely you can retrieve your music directly from your MyGig hard drive with the free QNX File Manager after you connect the drive directly to your PC or Mac. It actually easy to get your MyGig unit out of the car, and easy to get the hard drive out of your MyGig system. See Instructions for this part of the task.

Ripped vs. Uploaded Music Files

Music installed from a CD

Music files installed on your MyGig system directly from a CD are stored on the hard drive in the WMA file format. If you copy the WMA files from your hard drive they will not have the ID3 tags imbedded identifying Artist, Song, Album etc. If you later upload the WMA files back to your system from a Flash Drive, your MyGig system will not identify the music tracks. The MyGig system only uses the internal GraceNote database to tag music at the moment its being copied from the CD and it does not imbed the ID3 information in the actual WMA file.

Bottom line . . To recover music from your hard drive originally installed from a CD you will need to use an ID3 Tag Editor  to tag the music files before you upload the files back to your system. An ID3 Tag Editor  can do much of the work of identifying and tagging your untagged music files.

Music uploaded from a USB drive

MP3 and other supported files that you uploaded to your system from a USB drive are already tagged, so if you later retrieve them directly from your hard drive they will still be tagged.

Recovering Music from your MyGig Hard Drive

  • First
    1. Remove your MyGig hard drive in order to connect it to your PC    Instructions
    2. You need a USB to IDE adaptor to connect the MyGig hard drive to your computer    On Amazon

    3. Unless your computer has a Fat32 partition, you will need to copy your music files from your MyGig drive to a USB Flash Drive or USB Hard Drive. It must be formatted with Fat32 which is usually the default file system on new USB Flash Drives.

      Windows can't format a Fat32 partition larger than 32GB. If you have a large USB drive that isn't Fat32, you can create and format a 32GB partition on your USB drive using the Windows "Disk Management" utility from any version of Windows.

    4. Download the QNX Development Platform 6.5 CD .ISO   Download   Then burn the .ISO to CD
  • Then
    1. Connect your MyGig hard drive to your computer
    2. Connect your Fat32 USB drive to your computer
    3. Boot into the QNX CD
    4. Select F2 when asked to run QNX from the CD
    5. User Name = root    Password = no password required
    6. Go to Utilities and select File Manager - Copy and Paste your albums or the whole Playlist folder to your USB drive. The same wallet sized USB drive can be plugged directly into your MyGig system after you reinstall it in your car to import the music