iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode, constantly comes up

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iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode, constantly comes up

I was listening to my iPod when all of a sudden, when I went to skip to the next song, it just went to the next song, but would not play. I would press the play button, the play arrow would be displayed, yet no playback started. At this point, I did a reset, pressing and holding the menu + select until the apple logo appeared. I then got the sccreen showing the usb cable wiith the mesage "connect to iTunes to restore". I then connected it to computer running the latest version of iTunes. iTunes displayed the message "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode. You must restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes". I click OK to close this window and at the iTunes main screen, select the 'restore' button. The message comes up "are you sure you want to restore...", I then selected Restore. The "Extracting software" message followed by the "restoring ipod" message came up. It then said the iPod was restored and is restarting. On the iPod, the apple logo comes up then the screen flashes white and then the screen showing the usb cable with the mesage "connect to iTunes to restore" reappears. it seems to be stuck in this loop. I changed the drive letter assigned to the iPod but that didn't make a difference. A couple months ago, I had a similiar issue where I got the message about the iPod being corrupted and I restored it and that worked fine and all was fine with the iPod after. Is this a indication of some kind of intermittant hardware problem? Has anyone else had the same issues? Any suggestions as to how to get this to work and what may have gone wrong why all of a sudden I had playback issues in the beginning? I don't know if this is coincidence or not, but I had some videos on it that I recorded earlier in the day. The time I had the corruption problem a couple of months ago, I had some video recorded on it also.

Dell Inspiron 8600 (Windows XP) / Dell Dimension E521 (Windows Vista), iPod Nano 2G 4 GB (Pink) / iPod Nano 4G 8GB (Orange) / iPod Touch 2G 32GB

Posted on Mar 6, 2010 10:51 PM

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Answer 1

tdur Author

Level 1

35 points

Mar 9, 2010 9:39 PM in response to tdur

Well, I finally got my iPod formatted and restored. I had problems on my windows XP computer in that I couldn't get the iPod formatted in Windows nor would iTunes get out of the "iPod in recovery mode" loop after numerous restore attempts.

I did the following on my Windows Vista computer and was able to finally get the iPod to work:

I first tried the iPod in iTunes to attempt a restore but got the same "iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode" error message.

After exiting iTunes, I did a format of the iPod in Windows as follows: FAT32, cluster size 8 KB, and did a "Quick" format. Format was successful this time. Disconnected the iPod using "safely remove hardware".

Then, restarted iTunes and reconnected the iPod. This time I was able to do a restore, name the iPod and set sync preferences and sync files to the nano.

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Answer 2

scm1231

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0 points

May 8, 2010 6:39 PM in response to tdur

How did you format the ipod in Windows?

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Answer 3

tdur Author

Level 1

35 points

May 8, 2010 10:24 PM in response to scm1231

With the iPod connected, I opened 'My Computer' then Right clicked on the iPod and selected 'Format' from the drop down list and used the format settings as mentioned in my previous post. The format of course will erase all your files (music, videos,..) from the iPod.

When the format in Windows was completed successfully, I selected 'Safely remove hardware' and selected the iPod, then after the ok to disconnect message, I unplugged it from the computer.

Next, I started up iTunes and hooked the iPod back up to the computer. Then I was able to successfully restore/re-set the iPod up again (like what is done when you hook a new iPod up in iTunes).

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