iPod classic always in recovery mode

Have you had a chance to look at this troubleshooting page? If not, have a look at the bottom section that covers what to try if the message keeps reappearing: iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore

Towards the end it says "If after restoring your iPod, the message described above reappears, the iPod drive letter may need to be reassigned. See the "Change the Drive Letter" section of this document for steps to assign a different drive letter" which contains a link to this article: Windows confuses iPod with network drive and iTunes may exhibit strange behavior in relation to the iPod.

yeah i have the same problem when i restore mine, continuous restoring and no progress. help!

I restored my iPod on another PC because on mine, I had en error 1436.

See: Error 1436 when restoring any iPod using iTunes 7 or later.

on that PC, the letter that my iPod had on mine is already used for the main HDD (C:), so I can't change it.

Don't know what you mean there. The idea is that you change the iPod drive letter to something that's unused so that it doesn't clash with another letter such as the one used by your main hard drive.

I had the same problem, and it turns out that I had my idisk drive connected from my .mac account to a network drive, I think in this case it was M: but I doubt that matters. Essentially, no matter how many times I attempted to connect my iPod to sync, it would report being in restore mode, and the restore would never complete.

I disconnected the network drive and the restore completed, and the ipod syncs normally now.

I think someone else had suggested that any network drive may account for this problem, so you may want to consider disconnecting any network drives before attempting to connect your iPod.