My 4th gen (pre-video) iPod went on the blink a week or two ago. It’s been a little sketchy for a while now, especially with my work machine. But it recently became so problematic that I could just barely get Windows to recognize it. Luckily, my Line 6 TonePort arrived the day after the iPod went crazy, so I had something music-related to occupy my time and my thoughts. But, tonight, I decided to take a second stab at fixing the iPod.
First off, I’d tried all the steps Apple recommends. I’ve reset and restored it plenty. But nothing was working. Finally, I found some help page from apple recommending running the setup utility from the CD that came with it. So I tried that, and, a few connections later, it stopped coming up in Windows Explorer as the generic “Apple iPod” and remembered it’s name (“wheatpod,” of course). I tried copying a few songs over, but it appeared unwritable. So I did yet another restore and that seems, for the moment, to have fixed it. I’m carefully copying over an album or two at a time, seeing how much it can take before whatever weirdness–which I suspect is hard-drive related–brings it to a crawl again.
Flipped over to check the status of the copy and now everything but Firefox seems locked up. No fun…