I’d given up hope on my 4th generation iPod. It had been my daily companion since I got it for Christmas a few years ago. A hard-drive issue sidelined it earlier this year, and I was too busy to deal with it. I did a little research, tried resetting it and restoring it via iTunes several times, but nothing worked. Sometimes it was stable enough to move a few songs over to it. But then it would crash. Sometimes, it wouldn’t even pull up in iTunes or even in Windows. So I commandeered my wife’s 2nd gen iPod Shuffle and decided I’d deal with mine later. (She has a nice 5th gen iPod video that she tried to give me, but I’d feel too guilty.)
I finally dig it out of desk drawer today and, to my surprise, it pulled up without trouble in the Windows OS and in iTunes. So I did a little more research and decided to try reformatting it with Windows (i.e. navigating to it via “My Computer,” right-clicking it, and choosing “Format…” I’d read that this will sometimes work. And, in my case, it seems to have. Once Windows was finished formatting it as FAT32, iTunes recognized it and told me it needed to be restored. After that, it seems to work fine. I haven’t loaded it all the way up yet, but I thew some music on it and have been digging it as I work around the house.
And now I have total audiobook fever. I need to rewire the speakers in my car so I can turn my morning commute back into book/music time. It’s not like listening to NPR is doing me any good.