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

Mike
Are you trying the restores from disk mode?

Did the iTunes 8 see the ipod?

What are the restore failures doing?

I have been back and forth wiping it out and restoring with iTunes 9 on both a mac and pc running win7. Since the original problem when I got this ipod from my friend, I have not had a restore fail, tho the mac restore seems to leave a corrupt ipod disk. I tried to restore probably 30 times on both mac and pc when I first got the "bad" ipod and kept aborting about 1/10 thru with error 1430 or 1439. It wasnt til after I did a restore on the iTunes 8 laptop that it will consistently now restore with the mac or pc. Crazy! Its like there is something the old restore didnt check or did, iTunes 9 is not. I cant break it now to make a restore fail. I have unplugged it in the middle of restores, formatted it with Windows.. I am now still able to restore it.

Here is an article Apple wrote about this that might help.

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1372

i

So you sync up music to the iPod. How much music? Are you filling it up? Can you tell us how many tracks and the total memory size of the stuff your syncing?

When you connect your iPod to iTunes, does it take a long time for iTunes to see the iPod?

Then when it sees the iPod, that is when it tells you that you have to restore?

i

Let me see if I have the sequence of events down for your issue.

1) Connect to iTunes, it reports the iPod needs to be recovered or restored? Also, how long does it take for iTunes to show your iPod on the left hand side? Does iTunes show the little beach ball "I am working on it" cursor while this is going on?
2) It lets you go through the restore or recover process.
3) Once you are done with recover/restore, you are able to sync music to the iPod
4) Once you disconnect, the iPod indicates that it does not have anything on it.
5) Once you connect back to iTunes - you are stuck back at step 1.

Is that all correct?

How many others who are having a problem are seeing it this way?

It seems like there are several different issues being discussed here, lets try and pin down this version - then we can clearly define the next issue and work that.


i

thats ring around the rosey stuff.. who is going to remove the USB drivers for their keyboard and mouse????

I am on to some Win7 testing now.. restore worked with iTunes 9 but after syncing there were corrupt MP3s on the ipod. I traced the tunes to valid working songs on my win7 HD by matching exact # of bytes, date and time. A windows Chkdsk w/o fix reports the corrupted files on the ipod..

I just notices all these files in my MP3 folder with .TMP extension I am trying to figure out how they got there and if they might be a problem. e.g.
Joe Walsh - Turn To Stone.mp3~RF2203ad41.TMP

more to come..

Flipperoff-- thanks. I really appreciate your research and experiments here. I've spent more than 20 hours on this in the past month. If I could restore my iPod under iTunes 8 and just forget about iTunes 9, that would be heaven. To answer your questions:

1. Yes, I am restoring from disk mode.

2. It's funny: right now, iTunes 8 is not seeing my iPod, but I've "only" let it sit there for 30 minutes or so. There have been reports of having to wait hours or all night for a corrupted iPod to be recognized, so right now I am going to try connecting it overnight to see what happens. This is on a laptop that never had iTunes 9 installed on it. In fact, the hard drive was wiped clean and I installed a clean version of iTunes 8 on it.

Also, when I was trying this last week, iTunes 8 would recognize this same iPod, so I fear that all of my experiments have made the problem worse and the iPod is getting more and more corrupted.

3. Over the past month, there have been points where it seems that I was able to restore this same iPod, both in iTunes 8 and iTunes 9. The restore cycle would apparently work. One time I was actually able to get the final screen where I was able to name my iPod. But even after that, I later plugged in and it asked to restore again. That's the weird thing about this whole situation. It actually seems to make your iPod more and more corrupt the more you try.

The latest versions of my restore failure (before it completely froze up) looked like this: iTunes 9 would wait about 5 minutes and then give me the message: "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." When I clicked OK and then RESTORE, iTunes appeared to restore the iPod, but then the iPod never appears in iTunes and after about 5 more minutes, I got the same message: "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." This repeated over and over ... forever.

But now, as I said, iTunes 8 is not recognizing my iPod at all.

This is a 6th-generation, 80GB iPod Classic from 2007. It has the latest firmware (1.1.2).

I need to say this, in case Apple is listening: I would love to buy a new iPod to replace this bad one, but I can't afford it and I'm too angry at Apple now. If Apple would just admit the mistake, I could move on. But as it stands, I will buy a different brand media player if this situation isn't fixed. Many people on this board have said the same thing.

Mike: Did you ever attempt to format the ipod drive? It may need the master boot record to be detected?? I did a lot of partitioning and formatting the ipod drive via my Macbook Pro Disk Utility. I dont think there are the needed options in windows to format it correctly but I am not sure.

Is autorun enabled on that laptop? Will it do the app selection popup if you insert a usb memory stick? I believe when I installed itunes 8 on my old xp laptop it asked to enable autorun. I did have cases where it took a while to recognize the ipod but it wasnt hours.

Fliperoff-- thanks.

1. Yes, I've attempted to format the iPod drive. The easiest way to do that on a PC (as you know) is to open up MY COMPUTER, right click on the iPod, and select FORMAT. My corrupted iPod shows up under MY COMPUTER but only as a generic "removeable disk," not as an iPod. When I right-click on it, it takes about 10 minutes to recognize the right-click, and when I attempt FORMAT, nothing seems to happen. Another user on this forum recommended a "low-level disk re-format" (which I had never heard of), so I downloaded a utility from the internet. The utility recognized the iPod as an iPod and attempted to do a low-level re-format. It took about 90 minutes. Along the way, there were format errors, which another user on this forum believes that it indicates a bad hard drive on the iPod. (That may be true, but again I wonder: why did my iPod's hard drive choose to fail at the exact same time that I installed iTunes 9?) I don't know of any other good way to do the format.

2. Yes, autorun is enabled on my laptop.

Thanks.

@ mike I went thru the same problems. The only thing that worked for me was having the only thing connected to my laptop was the ipod no wireless mouse or any other usb port being used. Yes however it worked once to download my songs, MOST of them...lol. I havent yet tried to sync again or add any songs yet though. Am kinda happy with the whole, i got it to work once and dont want to temp fate.

@cynlou, thanks. Unfortunately, that workaround doesn't work for me. I am currently trying to get my iPod to sync on an older laptop running iTunes 8 with no other USB devices attached other than my corrupted iPod.

Apple seems to have finally acknowledged the problem http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2009/12/08/apple-investigating-itunes-9-syncing-iss ues/

Hallelujah!

last nights findings.. where to start.. I spent a late night. I have an ipod classic with 3055 songs on it using Win7 itunes 9 but it wasnt pretty.. my notes are
1. If I tried to do a complete sync, at around song 150 all the sudden it would really slow down. Like 1 minute a song.
2. Eventually it would get some (11) or random error and bomb.
3. On several occasions after a restore, my USB keyboard didnt work. I had to unplug it and plug it back in to revive it. USB conflict??
4. I went into Music sync and did it by separate artist. I would select about 10 at a time (25-50) song and they would sync at mostly normal speed.
5. I started feeling it might be some buffer filling problem so I would give it a break now and then, disconnect ipod and restart itunes.
6. A coupled times when I reconnected windows reported a corrupt disk to fix. I ignored it.
7. Several times I did a verify with my mac on the ipod partition and at one point it reported errors so I had disk utility on the mac repair. Then windows didnt report the disk problem next connect.
8. One connection Itunes popped up it needed a restore, I ignored that too and synced more songs.
9. In the middle I synced one movie. 3/4 of the download went relatively fast. the last 1/4 of it took 3 times what the first 3/4 took. It did sync the movie eventually.
10. I sat and listened to a bunch of songs and it seemed to operate normal. I just plugged it in again and Windows 7 says there might be some problems with files on K:(ipod) and asking me to scan and fix. iTunes sees it. Put it Mac to verify and it reported no problems. Back on win7, wants it fixed. Back on Mac verify ok, repaired anyway. Back on Win7, popup needing scan and fix. Closed that popup. Went to the K:(ipod) properties-tools-error checking (with no fix checked). Win disk check reported no errors. On connection win7 keeps saying to scan and fix. Going to reboot and see if it stops since check disk too on same pc finds no errors. Boot sector error?? More after reboot.

8.

Well I've been having problems with my iPod Classic too. I'd eventually looked around online and found out about the compatibility issues with the iPod and iTunes 9 (I had been thinking my iPod was the problem). My iPod would not load anything. It seemed that it was loading, then it would stall and nothing transferred and I've had an empty iPod for days.

Anyway I have installed the latest version of Songbird with iPod support and have been successfully transferring music from it onto my iPod. You will need to make one or two settings adjustments in iTunes (also I restored mine before Songbird recognized it) but it works like a charm. In fact it works just as iTunes should but doesn't.

rebooted win7 pc and still get the popup telling me to scan and fix the ipod drive (K:).. mac disk utility sees no problem. Going to the properties of K: and in tools to check disk, shows no problem if it checks it. WEIRD... I am afraid to click scan and fix.. going to find another disk utility to examine it more.