Laptop crashes when connecting iPod

[chezchas]

Hi -

My brother gave me his early-model iPod because he purchased a newer one. (I think it's the 5Gig model). It works great as a standalone player to play the music that was on it when I received it.

Now I'm trying toto connect this Mac-formatted iPod to my Sony Vaio laptop running Windows XP. I've successfully installed MacOpener and Ephpod.

However, every time I connect the iPod to the built in firewire port on my laptop, I get the Blue Screen of Death, with the error NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS.

I've done some searching on the web and tried some solutions, but none of them work. For example, I used regedit to increase my IRPSTACKSIZE from 11 to 25, but to no avail.

I've also tried disabling Norton Anti-virus.

My firewire port and cable work fine with my Sony DVD burner, so I don't think they are the problem.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions? Thanks!!!

[ashawley]

The iPod is very picky as to which cards it will work with. While I don't have a solution w/your existing ports, a PCMCIA firewire card might do the trick. Try to get an Adaptec one, they tend to work well.

Also, unistall MacOpener. I used to have BSODs when I first tried that (before there were WiPods).

It might be that that's causing the problem. If so, you can then simply download and install the 1.3 updater program from Apple, and run it to convert the MiPod to a WiPod. You'll lose all the tunes on there, but at least you'll have a WiPod.

Oh, and you'll need to re-load the correct version of ephpod (the one w/o MacOpener).

Adam

[chezchas]

Adam -

Thank you for your suggestions.

Your recommendation to uninstall MacOpener was especially helpful. It worked! As soon as I did this, the laptop no longer crashed when I attached the iPod. The laptop recognizes the iPod as a removable drive, but asks to format it (of course, this is expected since MacOpener is not there to "interperet" the Mac format).

Now I can take the route of converting the iPod to a Windows iPod as you suggested -- but it's late so I'll work on it some more tomorrow!

Thanks again!

[Riceboi]

Is it asking you to format the IPOD unders Windows Explorer? becuase if so...i really don't recall my ipod doing that...just make sure that your ipod manager recognizes the ipod (the red X is not over the ipod icon) i think that's it...i'm not sure but work is sure freakin boring. :)

[chezchas]

Riceboi -

Thanks for the reply. I guess I didn't describe the situation very well. The Windows operating system recognized my iPod as an attached drive (in my case, drive G:) and prompted me if I wanted to format drive G: (It never actually used the term iPod in relation to the drive).

At any rate, I'm happy to say I'm up and running now -- I never was able to get MacOpener to work. But I don't need it now because I used Winniepod updater to update my iPod to a Windows iPod. Now I am using Ephpod to successfully load music on to it! Great!

[ashawley]

chez:

Just so you know if by "Winniepod Updater" you mean you used the old hacked version of the updater tool, you don't need that anymore.

You can just download the 1.3 Version (http://www.apple.com/ipod/download/ipodsoftwareupdate13.html) of the firmware, install it and run it. You'll have all the latest and greatest.

Adam

[chezchas]

ashawley -

Thanks for the tip -- I wasn't aware that the firmware was available directly from apple!

Doug Taylor

[chezchas]

I installed the 1.3 update directly from Apple just to make sure that the "hacked" firmware wasn't part of the problem. It must not have been because I'm still having the problem.

(But thanks again, ashawley, for pointing out the link to the real firmware -- I want to make sure I've got the real stuff!)

A couple corrections:

I said that the string of characters in the Comment field was different for every song. That's not true. It's the same for all songs in an album, and different for different albums (at least that's what I'm observing so far). Also, I speculated that the first digit was the track number, but it isn't.

Here's another example of this "mystery string" -- I'm giving another example because I think it might be an important clue to what's going on. Maybe someone recognizes where strings of this type come from:

14+06793CF6306532BE42A1015E8FC3B016+1137


Regards,
Doug Taylor

[ashawley]

I think I posted this in your ephpod thread. That mystery string is most likely added by WMP9. That's what you're using to tag right?

Use a good tag editor to edit your tags and not WMP9. Microsoft uses the standard to suit their own needs (putting what appears to be garbage data in).

Adam

[chezchas]

Oops! I got my threads mixed up and posted info about the missing genre tags in the wrong thread -- c'est la vie. Anyway, thanks for the diagnosis, ashawley.

Doug

[sransom]

I had this persistent crash when connecting a mac formatted ipod to my dell windows xp sp2 with MacOpener. I tried every idea I could find online to resolve. Then finally resolved this by uninstalling MacOpener and installing MacDrive instead.

Happy iPoding!;)