Is my iPod dead?

Asked by asteraceae (20

) January 9th, 2010

I plugged my iPod nano (3rd gen) into my mac a few hours ago to charge. Just now, I looked over and the screen was completely blank. I reset it, but then iTunes gave me this message:

“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”.

My iPod’s icon folder thing that shows up on the desktop is telling me that it’s still 7.39gb large (615.4mb free), but all the folders show up empty. The iPod screen, when I eject it, also tells me that I have no music.

If it’s just the iPod itself that’s dead, I can always buy a new one, but unfortunately, not all of my music is on this computer. Some of it I don’t even know where it came from. Plus, I share this computer with my sister, and I drag-and-drop rather than automatically syncing, so it’d be nearly impossible to filter through the contents of our music library to put my playlists and such back together.

Anybody have any ideas? :’(

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3 Answers

So far reset or restore has always done the trick for me. The only thing I can suggest is to go to the Apple.com site and click on iPod support. See if anyone else there has had the same problem. Lots of info in there.

rooeytoo (26981

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Put it into disc mode and see what happens. I’m sorry, I forget the combination of buttons to push for that, but they are listed in the help file. Then, if it works, copy your music over to your computer, and then fuck around with the iPod, after the music is safe.

dpworkin (27085

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