Cannot Acess Extremely Important Data...

I recently used my MP3 Player as a USB Drive to store about 1 gig of pictures and videos I had on my PC in order to format and it and put a fresh install of Vista on my rig. To my dismay however, whenever I plug my MP3 player into my PC, it sees it as an audio player with space taken up, but no viewable files. I noticed that on my last install of Vista my PC saw it as a "USA Mass Storage Drive" and not an "Audio Player" as it does now. I can still look at the pics/vids/docs in my MP3 player, I just need to get them of off there, lol. But the question is how... Thanks!

What kind of MP3 player is it?

It's a Nextar brand, def not the best lol.

I'm assuming you have tried going though my computer and seeing if it is there.

I'm sure there is a easier way, but this is a sure fire way to do it. Download A linux live CD and mount the mp3 player.

If you have a USB stick then you can use these directions and boot from a USB stick https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromImgFiles or just burn a CD.

Then go to the bios and set it to boot from USB stick or CD. Then load the linux CD and mount the MP3 player. Some options are different in different distros, but in Ubuntu click places and then the MP3 player. After that it will put a Icon on your desktop which you can browse and get your data. Mount your windows disk the same way as your MP3 player and move the data to your hard drive.

Let's hope that someone has a little bit easier way of doing that, lol. I'll do that if that if no one does though.

The way Bob's suggesting is actually pretty easy... It sounds more complicated than it is.  I was going to suggest the same, but was waiting for someone to suggest a "Windows-way" so that it wouldn't just sound like I was promoting Linux (again).  :)

As a shortcut to learning how to mount your Windows drive, you could just plug in another USB drive and just copy the files from your music player to it.

It's literally this easy:

1. Download and burn a LiveCD (http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/daily-live/current/karmic-desktop-i386.iso).
2. Boot the LiveCD, choose the default "don't install or change anything" option.
3. Once the desktop appears, attach/insert your USB devices.
4. Copy from one USB device to the other like this:

If you do decide to try your hand at mounting your Windows drive and copying the files there, you'll need to do these extra steps first:

1. Open a Konsole window (click the K-Menu icon and start typing 'konsole' and it will bring up the link).
2. Make a temporary mount point:  Type 'mkdir /tmp/windows'
3. Mount the drive with the command 'sudo mount /dev/sda1 /tmp/windows'
4. Navigate to /tmp/windows in the file manager.

Note that the device name in step 3 can vary depending upon where you have Windows installed.  The first two letters of 'sda1' indicate the drive is a SCSI/SATA/USB device; IDE drives will usually start with 'hd' instead.  The third letter, 'a' in this example refers to the particular drive (the second would be 'b', the third 'c', etc.).  The last number is the partition number where you have Windows installed.

For most users, it will be 'sda1', unless they have an OEM version of Windows where the vendor thought they'd be super-clever by putting the recovery partition before the actual Windows partition... in which case it might be sda2.  You can always use "sudo fdisk -l | grep /dev" to see which devices and partitions exist (and their sizes) when in doubt.

Not really a "windows" way ;) ;) But you could attempt a boot into a PE-type media (BART PE for instance) and see if it recognizes the mp3 player as a storage device....if so you could pull the data off that way with a simple copy paste

Hmm. TestDisk & PhotoRec from the command line in a windows installation that can see the drive can do wonders.

OK. Here is what I recommend. Insert the USB stick in a port. Then Click on the start button, choose 'change auto play settings'. This will let you associate an action with the USB stick. It definitely is worth a try.