20GB ipod only showing 16GB... Why???

[Schiben]

I know that a formatted 20GB drive should have somewhere around 18.5GB available for use. Mine was like that til this past weekend. I had an issued where my wife put my ipod on a speaker (magnet) and after that it wouldn't show hat it had any music on it. I did a hard re-start on it a couple times to see if something would change but it didn't. I restored the ipod through itunes and I've re-formatted the drive a couple different ways through windows (7) but it still only shows 16GB available after format. Anyone have any ideas?

[Schiben]

I've also done disk management stuff like checking/fixing drive errors, which none were found. I'm at a loss as to why I'm missing 2.5GB of free space.

[Sparkee]

For the most part it would take a very powerful magnet to damage a hard drive or even erase credit cards. It is possible, but highly unlikely with the magnets available to the general public. I suspect it was purely coincidental and your iPod's hard drive, which is close to or over 10 years old, is just failing. A part of the drive that went unreadable probably held part of the iPods OS or data base files that caused the iPod to appear empty. When you run the disk utilities it detected the bad sectors marking them to no longer be used for data. It may still last another 10 years but it may also continue to lose sectors in turn hard drive space as well as getting corrupted or having songs not play properly.

[kornchild2002]

The magnet in the speaker would have to be rather large. I don't think any modern home theater system would be able to do this (unless you are using IMAX THX specifications, but then you would be spending a cool $300,000) but I have come across huge magnets in older speakers that could easily damage hard drives especially if they were trying to access data. I have a magnet from an old shelf speaker system that was used in the bottom 10" bass cone. The magnet is about 2.5" thick and has a ~6" diameter. I know that would damage a hard drive as it has done so already. Would it damage a hard drive if it wasn't in direct contact with it? I don't know, that would have to be some pretty thin wood/plastic housing.

Either way, I would agree with Sparkee in that your iPod's hard drive is old. 20GB iPods haven't been made since 2004 so you have something that is at least 7 years old. That is a long time for a portable hard drive as most tend to give out after 5-6 years, maybe even sooner. Did you use a dedicated disk program and not the utilities built into Windows to scan the hard drive? The ones that MS has in Windows (including Windows 7) are rather superficial and don't really go in-depth. I highly recommend that you either find a friend with a Mac or download a free dedicated disk utility on Windows and scan the hard drive again. That might give you more insight as to what happened.