My Audi Allroad freezes and fries my iPod

I have a 160G Classic with about 38k songs. I have successfully connected my iPod to my 2013 Audi's AMI system but now on a 3rd occasion the AMI system has frozen when I went to change playlists and also completely fried the iPod. I have had to force it into disk mode reformat and reload the tunes. This time I think the situation may be fatal. I put the iPod in disk mode and connected it to my computer interface. The ipod-as-disk icon appears only for a few seconds on my screen before it disappears. Right-clicking on it in those few seconds does not even present the option to format. Very disturbing!

Any clues?