I don't think my iPod survived the "rapture"

[bigjohnny7]

So, I woke up today to put some Steely Dan on my iPod (5th generation, 80GB). I turn it on - there's no songs, no videos, nothing.

I had been getting very, very close to filling it over the last couple of days and I think adding a few podcasts to it last night may have been the straw that broke the camel's back.

When I plug my iPod into iTunes now, it says it can't read it. Aaarrrggghhh!

When I open my ABOUT screen in my iPod, it says Songs = 0, Videos = 0, Photos = 125, Capacity = 74.3 GB, Available = 605 MB.

Is there any way I can get my music back, without doing a full restore? I'm on manual sync, and although I have everything backed up, it'd just be a pain in the @ss to get it back to how it was.

Many thanks in advance!

 

[kornchild2002]

No, you need to restore your iPod. The database file became corrupted so now your iPod's firmware does not know what it has on it. You cannot simply make a new database and copy it over to your iPod as iTunes does not work that way. This type of thing actually happens quite a bit to iPods with hard drives in them. I remember giving my Mom a 3G 10GB iPod for Christmas pre-loaded with a few hundred tracks only for it to do the same thing when she opened it that day (all the way back in 2003). It turned out the database was written to bad sectors so I went to go exchange it for a 4GB first generation pink iPod mini (since she would never use anything beyond that capacity).

 

[randregL]

I had a similar problem with my iPhone.

When I upgraded the iOS, I "lost" my audio files. They still showed up in terms of how many audio files were on the device, but when you opened the iPod app, there was nothing there. I found a forum thread somewhere that suggested changing the language setting to something other than English, rebooting the device, and then checking to see if the audio files came back. I did this, and it worked! I was then able to reset my language to English, and everything was fine. You might try this and see if it works before totally resetting your device.

Good luck!

 

[ipod rescue]

You could try a free program called sharepod. Connect to that and it may be able to read all your files on the ipod. from there you can back them all up to your PC and then do a restore on the ipod. relaod your library from the backup and then resync the ipod.