A few days ago, I got a message that it was corrupted, and I should “restore” it. I held off on doing that for a couple days until I made sure I had the >7K songs backed up. Now that I’m ready to re-format the hard drive and reload all the songs, my computer won’t recognize the iPod. It won’t show up in Windows, and when I leave it connected Windows gets hung up both starting and shutting down.
I’ve spent the last few hours googling and tried everything I can come up with, but I’m still left with “USB Device Not Recognized.”
Does anyone know how I can force my computer to allow me to reformat the disc? Or whatever?
The same thing happened to me a while ago, although I use a Mac and not Windows. I took it into a Mac store and the “Mac genius” plugged it into a store computer and everything was fine. We could not figure out what happened or why attaching it to the store computer would correct the problem. But it’s been fine ever since.
On the theory that results are more important than reasons, have someone else attach it to their computer and see if that helps.
I plugged it into another computer. I was able to “find” it, but iTunes wouldn’t let me “restore” it. Then, on the bus, I find out it’s empty: not a single song on it.
So, just now, I plugged it into that second computer, and I’m “formatting” it in Windows. Hopefully a total wipe will allow me to start over.
That will probably work, assuming you’re using iTunes to do the reformat and not the Windows Explorer (which is only reformatting the drive, not installing the software).
I’ve also found resetting the device makes it findable again when it isn’t: slide the hold switch on for a second or two, then off, then hold down both “MENU” and the center button for about five seconds or until the screen clears. Give it a minute to come back, then try plugging it in again.
I had the same problem a while back (I can’t remember exactly when or which thread it was in) but someone (I can’t remember who either - perhaps he’ll step forward here) posted that a possible fix was really simple and completely free of cost.
Bang the iPod vertically, port side down, on a padded surface (like a mouise pad or a stack of paper towels) firmly but not too hard. It jogs the innards back into place (or some such). It’s one of those things Apple doesn’t tell you but it works - I’ve had to do it a few times since then and it works every time - and I didn’t even lose my playlists.
K, so I formatted the iPod in Windows: wiped the harddrive clean, I assume. Then I restored it through iPod. Then, when I went to sync it–to load all the songs back onto it–it worked on the task for a while, then errored that it couldn’t complete the task.
So I tried a couple more times–auto and manual–then tried to restore again. Now it won’t let me restore: “iTunes has detected an iPod that appears to be corrupted. You may need to restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes. You may also try disconnecting and reconnecting the iPod.” (Tried it; no go.)
So I click OK, then Restore again. Progress, and then: The iPod “iPod” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred.
I had a similar problem with mine, and it turned out to be a corrupted mp3 in my library (I guess).
When you’re resynchronizing after the restore, see if you can see if it’s always failing on the same song. You might not be able to see exactly which song it is, because they go pretty fast, and it does that stupid thing where it flashes between the progress bar with the song titles and the “Synchronizing…” message (or something like that). Anyway, I couldn’t tell what song it was exactly, but I could tell which album it was on. So, I set the “Only synchronized checked items” option, unchecked all those songs, and everything synched fine. Then I just re-ripped that CD, and it worked fine the next time I synchronized. I guess something was wrong with one of the tracks.
I’m not sure what happened, because I know that I had this track on my iPod previously. So it worked at one time, and then it stopped working. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have done anything to the mp3 file itself; I don’t usually mess around with them at all “manually”. But maybe iTunes buggered it up somehow.
No idea if this will work for you, but it worked for me.
I get “The disk could not be read from or written to” error whenever I’m trying to copy a large batch of files to the iPod. I’ve found that manually copying small batches (~100 or so) works fine. It’s annoying and you have to babysit the whole process, but I got my iPod restored this way. (I also have my iTunes set to manual so it doesn’t automatically sync everything.)