Dead IPOD need help copying files

Factual Questions
1

At work I’m known to be the go-to guy when your have problems with your home PC or PC type items.

The office manager’s son was having a problem with his IPOD. I determined it was the battery and showed her a website where they can order batteries for it. Her son could not wait for the batteries and bought a new IPOD. Then he realized he no longer had the music on his PC.

I suggesed he remove the drive then use an IDE to USB adapter to copy the music off.

Well they have the adapter and gave me the drive to copy the songs off.

I’m having a few problems.

I keep getting messages from XP saying Cannot Copy <filename>: The request could not be preformed because of an I/O device error.

  1. I need to know once I have the songs copied how do I get them onto his new IPOD. I can play them on my computer so I don’t believe he has any DRM on them

  2. An easy way to do the copying that will just skip the files it can not read

2

Is it possible that the drive just got corrupted in some way and thats why certain files won’t copy correctly?

Try a file recovery program, like PCI (http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm). That should do the trick, I think.

3

The Device I/O error seems to occur if you try and copy a whole bunch of files at once. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent quantity, but it’s usually in excess of 200 at a time. I don’t know what causes it, but I’m thinking it’s a buffer or synchronization error of some sort.

In any even the only way around it I’ve found is to copy in smaller batches of around 200 files at a time or thereabouts. It’s a bit of a pain to have to babysit it like that, but it works and saves all of the files. You’d be much better off using a program like CopyPod/CopyTrans, as it will restore proper filenames from the ID3 tags, and from my experience using it, it doesn’t encounter the I/O error.

To copy them to the new iPod, just drag them into his library. You’ll need to observe the same babysitting technique when copying them from the library to the iPod though, as the same I/O error will occur when writing them back to the iPod. And there’s no help for this one because you can’t just use the reverse process to copy them to the iPod. It has to be done from within iTunes.

4

Better would be a program like CopyPod (commercial software, though I’m sure there’s freeware out there for Windows) or Senuti (freeware for OSX.) That should recover everything including all the proper metadata.

5

I’m going to burn his files to CD’s this way he can load them as he gets time also so he will have a backup of his what I’m going to assume is legally obtained music.

I will look into commercial copying software since I’m technically going hard drive to hard drive at this time

6

Getting the songs on the iPod? Simple: download itunes (www.apple.com), add the music files into the library, plug in the iPod and itunes SHOULD recognize it as an iPod and convert the songs after he registers it.

7

This is bad.

The iPod needs a restore, but you’ll want to get the music off first. Try using a third party product capable of copying music from the iPod. There are lots.

Copy in smaller batches to see if you can get the music off.

8

As I’ve said in a few posts (and it appears to be overlooked) the music is no longer on an IPOD (as in Music pplayer by Apple) but the drive that was in the IPOD is hooked to a USB to IDE adapter so I can red the drive on my computer.

I have found a program that is supposed to work with the copying of many files and am trying it now