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

Update:

Well, the nice man from Apple Support thinks it's my iMac!! In a rather expensive attempt to prove that this is related to iTunes release 9.0.1 damaging my iPod I have just been and purchased a rather nice new shiney 32Gb iPod Touch. And, yes you guessed it I have had no problems syncing that! I have even tried syncing my iPod Classic with the new cable I received with my iPod Touch and it still doesn't want to know!

Come on nice people from Apple, admit that your new iTunes has somehow either stopped working with the iPod Classic, or for some reason it trashes the hard drive on the Classic during the sync process!

Found a solution that worked for me.

1. Reset iPod but when you see Apple logo press and hold Center button and Play/Pause to put into Disk Mode.
2. Plug iPod into USB
3. It synced for me.
4. Then reset iPod again to take out of Disk Mode
5. iPod works perfectly...(so far)...

Hope this helps...

The truth is..... ITUNES 9.0 KILLS IPOD CLASSICS!!!! Today after i downloaded itunes 9.0 i synced my ipod classic. After i synced it, IT WAS COMPLETELY BLANK! All my music and everything was gone! i reset my ipod, restarted my computer, and then tried to syc again. Then itunes 9.0 didnt even reconise my ipod class was there! Ive searched the web and it turns out this has happend to almost every ipod classic users. What i suggest you do is just wait with the rest of the world for Apple to make an "itunes patch" to fix this problem. Until apple makes a patch they probobly wont be selling any ipod classics for a while XD !!

I'm afraid I have the same issue here (itunes 9, ipod classic 120gb). Syncing freezes my computer, nothing gets loaded on the ipod anymore. Tried all the usual troubleshooting (restoring, reinstalling, other port, cutting from internet, blah, blah, blah) to no avail. It really seems to be an issue that Apple created and to see no resolution at all is very frustrating. I see visions of hours and hours trying to fix something that I didn't break myself.
I never expected situations like this from Apple.

Myriads of problems, but no reference to the update to Snow Leopard. I assumed that Snow Leopard was the culprit, since problems began after installation of the new os. The question is important: since I demonstrated some other failed functions to the personnel in a MAC shop it could be that no-one has faced the issue of Snow Leopard itself, aside from the iTunes included in that package.

I fixed my ipod classic by reformatting it!!! After restoring it over and over again it erased all my music and photos. After reformatting it (which took a good part a half an hour), I now have my photos. Fortunately I saved my songs to disc before I downloaded that piece of ** Itunes 9.0. It has synced perfectly now. Man, what a headache. Thanks again Apple.

I hope this helps someone else because I thought my ipod was dead.

@mooksmom
How did you reformat the iPod? Did you do it from within iTunes somewhere or from Windows/Mac as one would with a regular drive?

My computer is MAC. In the main iPOD menu in iTunes (where you set your preferences)there are two places to click (mine is in Italian and it says "ripristina" which will be something like "restore" in English (perhaps reset).
Backup your songs (if iTunes works) -- I didn't even bother, but my iPOD reformatted and I found most of my material and the reset iPOD.
One problem: I used to be able to plug it both into my PC and my MAC - now it tells me that "if you use this in your PC" you'll have to reformat the POD"" (in so many words). So, try the above if you don't care about sharing your songs with Windows.

I plugged in my ipod and opened itunes. When windows recognized my ipod I clicked on my computer, then right clicked on my ipod which gave me some options including reformatting the hard drive in it. I clicked on that and it took about 30 minutes to reformat but it is back to normal now. Hope this helped.

Mine seems to behaving, too. It had been giving me messages about some film shorts that couldn't be transferred to the iPOD and I had left it at that. But then, reading these discussions, I cancelled all the films downloaded or waiting for download, and this 30 GB Classic seems to be a bit happier.

I wonder if these issues with some of the iPod classics are due to the stupid stuff that Palm is pulling with the PRE. Mimicing Apples USB ID, and causing additional code blocks to reduce the ability for them to interface with iTunes may be a part of the problem.

While I know it's not helping those who are affected, I can't think to wonder if this is a stem to the problem and thus reverting to older versions is making that restriction not apply any longer (if that makes any sense, since the code is not installed in the 8.0 versions).

Truely I wish tht PALM PRE thing would end, and that they would stop interfacing to a product that they don't own or haven't been given any legal rights to if this is indeed causing us VALID Apple owers these headaches.

Based on their games with iTunes usage over the last couple of months, I would never own a PALM product! Ughh... Hope a solution is found soon!

Guys, if my experience is any indicator, reformatting, restoring, reseting, disk mode etc, none of these things will make a difference LONG TERM. I've been through all of them, and gotten encouraging results multiple times. However, after more than one synch or more than one or two times trying to work with my iPod, the problems do come back.

I do not want to believe othat Apple has actually released a software update that is physically damaging hardware, but for the time being, I really think this may be happening. All the indicators point to this eventuality. If it is true, then there is no patch or home-fix that Apple can release. This is Possibly why it is taking them so long to even acknowledge our problem (instead of suggesting we buy new iPods etc), because they are realizing that they may have a major rash of folks whose stuff is fried due to their new version of iTunes and that that rash may be pretty **** hard for them to relieve.

Speculation of course, but still. My iPod is F@#%&D. I've luckily got backups and was able, through reformatting, to add SOME of my music back. But, it's frozen again now, and if I do plug it in, it shuts down my entire OS, just just iTunes.

Thanks for letting me share.

Yeah, reformatting definitely doesn't work as a long term fix. I can maybe get a few more songs on, maybe a whole album, then it's back to freezing.

I thought I was special, but reading this thread I guess not. I too had the files corrupted message when I tried to synch my iPod classic 80GB. In my case at least, running a restore and then re-synching seems to have fixed it. Now I'm worried it won't stay fixed. This took hours to complete and I don't relish having to do it again!