"iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod. Go to the Summary tab in iPod preferences and click Restore to restore this iPod to factory settings."

Yes, start at the beginning. As long as you've got the space reclaiming media from the classic is relatively straightforward.

tt2

Results:

RETRACTS: 44

REALLOCS: 864

PENDING SECTORS: 400

POWERON HOURS: 1350

START/STOPS: 33258

TEMP: CURRENT 25C

TEMP: MIN 17C

TEMP: MAX 52 C

Gosh, that high number of Reallocs! 😮

Note I have (had) about 30,000 songs there on 128kbps, maybe that's why (?)

If I go to Disk Utility / Repair Disk it won't delete all my stuff, will it?

I don't wanna do a restore. That would be pretty much my very last option

Repaired the disk. Nothing happened. :-(

When I said start at the beginning... I meant this bit.

Recover media from a manually managed iPod

What follows are tips for restoring your iPod, but if it is the only location currently hosting some of your media then the first task is to try to extract it. See the user tip Recovering your iTunes library from your iPod or iOS device for some recovery tools. Most third party tools will probably require the device to have a functioning library however the techniques outlined in the iLounge Article referenced at the end should work as long as the device still shows up in Windows Explorer or Finder.

The last link in particular. You media files, or at least most of them, should be readable from within the hidden folders on the iPod. Once you have copied all of the files (that can be copied) onto a local drive you can organize them back into a coherent library. Whether you can then reset the iPod and get some further use from it depends on how bad it is, and whether it is getting worse. Regardless, the first step is to recover what data you can.

tt2

I downloaded Floola, but it just says "Init Error: itunes length (item mhsd)". What should I do? How am I supposed to recover my songs? I mean, it just talks about recovering the purchase in the post, but it's not only about iTunes purchases. My purchases are save in my Mac, I just wanna recover the other stuff.

...the techniques outlined in the iLounge Article referenced at the end should work as long as the device still shows up in Windows Explorer or Finder.

Free, using nothing more than Windows Explorer or Finder to view the hidden files & folders on the device.

Essentially you're looking to display hidden files and folders on the device which you need to be able to access in disk mode. Inside \iPod_Control\Music will be a set of folders labelled F00..F50 (I think the last number depends on the size of the device). Inside each folder will be a number of media files in with names like AGHQ.mp3. Copy all of the F## folders to your computer. Change the properties so that the files are no longer hidden. Add them to an iTunes library, e.g. by moving inside <Media Folder>\Automatically Add to iTunes and iTunes will rename any properly tagged files with their name & track number and group them by artist & album. .wav files end up in Unknown Artist/Unknown Album.

tt2

I'm sorry for being so annoying and inquisitive today, I just lost some patience throughout the day.

Here's what appears when I go "REGIUS" iPod:

Just that.

Not having immediate access to a Mac I cannot test things here, but there should be a hidden folder called iPod_Control there. There should be a way to reveal it. Check the free space of the drive. If the drive still has apparently used space then you should be able to reveal it and copy to your computer. If not then you may need to look for tools that can recover deleted files and folders. Again my experience with these is on the Windows side of things so you may need to do a little digging of your own.

From http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/copying-music-from-ipod-to-co mputer/P1

In Mac OS X, the process of displaying hidden files and folders is actually somewhat more complex, and requires entering commands into the “Terminal” application. To do this, open “Terminal” from under your Applications/Utilities folder, and then type in the following at the command prompt:

defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE

killall Finder

(Note that if you don’t know how to use “Terminal” or where to find it, you should probably stop reading this section now and skip ahead to the Third-Party Tools section, where all of these details can be easily handled for you)

Once you have typed in these commands, return to the Finder window and select your iPod from the drive listing, and you should see the iPod_Control folder:

Since viewing hidden files on Mac OS X can quickly become inconvenient, you can later turn OFF this feature by going back to Terminal and simply typing in the above two commands again, replacing the word “TRUE” with the word “FALSE.”

Once in the iPod_Control folder, you will see a number of sub-folders, including a Music folder. Despite the name, it is in this folder that all of your audio and video files actually reside. The only information that may be on your iPod that would be stored elsewhere are iPod Games and photos, which we will discuss at the end of this article.

Unfortunately, you’ll notice that the folder names and even the file names do not in any way represent the specific content.

Fortunately, however, the internal ID3 tags are still intact, so any application that can read these tags can easily sort this back out. In fact, you can take these tracks and simply reimport them directly into iTunes via the File, Add to Library option and it will happily sort them all out for you, even renaming and restructuring them in the process if you have the Keep iTunes Music folder organized setting turned on in your iTunes advanced preferences.

In fact, in a complete disaster-recovery scenario, you can even import ALL of your music files directly from the iPod itself by using the File, Add to Folder option in iTunes. To do this, you will first want to ensure that the Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library option is enabled in your iTunes advanced preferences:

Once you’ve confirmed that this setting is enabled (thus ensuring that iTunes will actually copy the tracks back to your hard drive instead of referencing them directly from your iPod), you can simply select File, Add Folder to Library (Windows) or File, Add to Library (Mac) and choose the \iPod_Control\Music folder directly. iTunes will copy all of your media tracks from your iPod back to your iTunes Music Folder location, organizing them into sub-folders by ARTIST and ALBUM in the process, and naming them appropriately, all based on the internal tag information that is still stored within the files themselves.

Once your music is all safely back on your computer and imported into your iTunes library, you could then reconnect the iPod and choose the Erase and Sync option, which would erase the content from your iPod and replace it with the newly-restored content in your iTunes library.

tt2

It worked all okay until...

What now? 😢

That file will be one that cannot be read back from the drive, and there are likely to be others given you have a number of pending reallocations. You may have to resort to copying folder by folder or even file by file. Or you need to use something other than Finder that can continue copying files and report the errors when it completes.

tt2

So, well, this is what I have been up to lately:

I have too many errors coming up, so i decided that maybe creating a new library on iTunes on my external hard drive would help... what is happening now is that I'm copying the files... I first copied 4 files, and this happened:

Cool, it seems to work so far...

Now, if I transfer like 20 or so, nothing shows up, but when I go to the info of the file where my new iTunes library is on my external hard drives, this shows that I have exactly what I copied to iTunes. I don't know what's happening.

What do you think?

Jeez, this is insane.

Thanks a lot for all the former answers.

iTunes doesn't scan the media folder automatically. You can either copy the files into the Automatically Add to iTunes folder (which is inside the media folder), or drag them into iTunes after copying them to your drive.

tt2

But I can't copy them to my drive, because it doesn't stop showing errors which don't let me to finish the backup