After iTunes 9 upgrade iPod Classic is corrupt without ability to restore

Well...I bit the bullet and attempted to call customer support.

I got April around 1pm (est). Around 2pm (est), she tapped out and tagged in Chris. He was pretty helpful and we went through a litany of things (such as deleting every last trace of iTunes or iTunes related folders).

Unfortunately, after two more hours, none of that worked.

Saturday morning I decided to upgrade iTunes and had this same problem (I have a 6th gen iPod Classic 160gb model.) At first I assumed this said my iPod was corrupt because I had started iTunes without restarting Windows first. After a restart I had a hard time getting my computer to recognize the iPod, and I eventually decided to manually "hard-reset" the iPod (hold down the Menu and center buttons). After I did that the iPod synced perfectly and lost nothing.

I immediately copied all my files on the iPod's hdd and did a restore. The restore worked successfully (it was the first time I had to restore the iPod since I purchased it in January 2008). After the restore I had to go through and fix a few files in my library that I had changed the location/file name of so they could sync those ~30 files. When I hooked the iPod up for this second sync it again told me the iPod was corrupt, so I "hard-reset" it again and it works fine. I have done this and gotten it to sync, taking albums off and adding new ones on, several times since yesterday. I can only guess this is a problem with iTunes 9 and I will wait for a patch to come out.

I can't tell you how happy I am to find this forum about this topic, makes me feel that I'm not alone in this. The advice I can give to everyone who has this same issue: if the "hard-reset" method won't work, don't panic; don't restore your iPod until you can get it to sync without a restore. I have had trouble with new iTunes releases in the past (I believe the last major trouble I had was with iTunes 8's initial release when I had a 5th gen iPod Video 30gb, I just waited it out).

For those of you who have either purchased a new iPod/unsuccessfully restored your iPod and deleted everything you had: either enjoy you're new product (I'll be grabbing a 7th gen Classic this January when I start my post-grad job since I think it will be the last Classic) or hope that you keep a backup of everything you don't want to risk loosing. I keep 3 copies of my 200gb+ mp3 collection because I care too much to loose it. I know that isn't the answer most of you want to hear, but its all I got. Apple is crap, that is why I will only give them my money for a music player. If I hadn't invested $150+ in my car to allow playback controls and charging of my iPod I would have already purchased a Zune or Archos.

I've been having this same problem, but I thought it was just an issue with my iPod. I called Apple support and they told me to uninstall and re-install everything, which I've done, and my iPod is syncing right now but keeps getting stuck or slowing down around 3gb. I found a solution here that I thought might work but haven't been able to try it yet.

Do we know if this is an issue with iTunes 9?

been having the same problem, except when I plug in my iPod iTunes just freezes then I unplug it and get the unknown error, so now i have an empty iPod that freezes up iTunes whenever I plug it in, and it's out of warranty, thanks apple.

After about 24 hours of trying everything I could think of, or find online, to fix this problem, and having no luck, I finally fixed it in about 2 minutes.

If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, install the iPod Remote App. Once you enter the 4 digit code in itunes to sync the remote app, use your remote to play a song to ensure it is synced. Then plug it in. Less than two minutes after plugging it in, iTunes recognized it.

No idea why this worked, but it did for me.

So I can tell you what I did with this issue, but I don't think a lot of you out of warranty are going to like it.

I bought my iPod in late February of 2009, so it still falls under the one year warranty with Apple Care. I took my iPod into a Dallas Apple Store and told them the issue I was having--basically that I was having to restore my iPod repeatedly and it would try to upload music to it but not get past about 351 songs. It was also having issues showing up in iTunes and disconnecting from iTunes...basically a mix of all of the above. One other thing I noticed was it was clicking repeatedly--with my background in computers...clicking in a hard drive is NEVER a good sign.

After running diagnostics on my iPod, trying other cables, and running diagnostics on my 10 month old MacBook Pro, they concluded the hard drive was shot in my 120GB iPod Classic. Now one thing I can honestly say is I updated my iPod in iTunes 8 right before I updated it in iTunes 9. So something in iTunes 9 is killing the hard drives in the classics...and since iPod Shuffle, Nano and Touch are all flash based MP3 players, they're not having this issue.

The moral of this story is: if you have an iPod Classic and it still falls under warranty go have it looked at by an Apple Genius and have it replaced. Then, before you connect it to your computer, uninstall iTunes 9 and reinstall iTunes 8. There is a short tutorial on how to recreate your iTunes Library for iTunes 8 so it doesn't give you any problems with it being an older version of iTunes here:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1451

That was my solution. Hope it helps.

I'm just absolutely devastated to find out that just because we installed Apple's new update for iTunes 9, us, iPod Classic users, are only left with nothing but corrupted iPods. I've tried restoring my iPod dozens of times. I thought I was the only one with this problem, but it turns out that there are many more with the exact issue. Would rollbacking the version of our iTunes solve the issue? Or are we just doomed because we're left with corrupted iPod's/hard drives?

I downgraded to iTunes 8 and the problem still pops up. It's really ******* me off that Apple is probably responsible for the death of a bunch of perfectly good iPods. I hope they either come out with a fix for this, or offer to fix damaged iPods for cheap or free.

OMG I wish I'd found this post an hour or two ago..... my 80GB Classic too died as soon as I opened iTunes 9.0 POS.
I'm not buying another - apple can go frikken whistle. Class action, anyone ?

same thing happened to me. 80gig Ipod crashed after i tried to sync it to the new itunes. now it goes to the grey apple restart screen and doesn't do anything else. its terrible. does no one really have a fix for this??

of course it works with the touch and iPhone, thats not what we're talking about here, it's iPod classic even says so in the title lol.

Just wanted to chime in and say my iPod classic has also been killed by iTunes 9. Awful.

Add me to the list. Out of warranty 160 classic. Wrecked after the itunes upgrade. I've done everything u can possibly imagine to try to restore the ipod but it is just a very expensive brick. I really hope Apple gets on the ball and helps us out here.

I cannot believe it. The Apple support doesn't know anything about this (why should they, since they haven't made the program and it is out since a week or slt) After a long process of testing out other operating systems and computers they tell you, you should repair it somewhere (of course that's part of their job and in all other cases they were right, hdd may be corrupted). I hope the developers of iTunes will fix this issue soon (if it ever can be fixed). To Apple developers: Please watch this page and try to make an iTunes update, by which we could restore our iPods and "repair" them somehow. We payed all about 350$ (€) for our 150 GB iPod Classic. This amount of money couldn't be washed away by an iTunes update (:-()

Edit: My brother advised me, that it is a 160 GB version (there's no 150 GB model).