Heartland

I own a 20GB 4th gen. iPod. These last few days it's been playing up, whenever I plug it into the PC I get the little noise that means "usb thingy inserted" but the iPod doesn't appear in iTunes and then iTunes freezes.

I tried reinstalling iTunes and resetting the iPod and it worked, but now I'm having the same problems again. I don't want to have to reinstall and reset every time I want to sync my pod.

What's going on?

Is 4th gen 1st full colour gen? I had one of those, 30GB, but it passed away, hard disk issues

When reinstalling iTunes you can reopen your previous library so that doesn't necessarily mean you'll have to upload each and every song every time!

Get a tape player.

Dark wrote:Get a tape player.

Young man, I didn't think you were that old!

Only listen to live music. Hmmph. The problems kids have today...when i was young, they didn't have stereo music, and if God had wanted us to listen to stereo music he would've given us two years.

Damn, the sounds are spiinning.

Obviousman wrote:Is 4th gen 1st full colour gen? I had one of those, 30GB, but it passed away, hard disk issues

When reinstalling iTunes you can reopen your previous library so that doesn't necessarily mean you'll have to upload each and every song every time!

It's a b&w one, actually it might be 3rd Gen... not sure lol.
It still works, and it is still recognised by the PC but it just doesn't show up in iTunes and iTunes crashes whenever the ipod is connected

What exactly is ipod, btw? and i'm being serious here...i've no idea. You can lissen to music with it?

FFS, i don't even have a cellfone.

I buy up old/dead iPods, if you have any of them laying around.

you can see the different models here:
http://www.everyipod.com/

3rd gen is the only one w/ the 4 buttons above the wheel
4th gen is B/W with grey wheel
ipod 'photo' is 4th gen with color screen
ipod 'video' is 5th and 5.5 gen

sounds like your problem may be a logic board.
could also be the hard drive. sometimes it takes swapping parts around to suss it. i've done a bunch of them.

I've got a 40-gig 3rd gen. that sometimes behaves like a complete @ss, but I still love it...

I reckon I own the 4th generation 'photo' iPod- holds 20G and I'm desperate to upgrade to a 40G once it 'breaks'

Any chance that the problem is the USB connector?

I have the 80gb 5th gen & that has it's moments.
But on the apple site there is a fairly useful forum, albeit frequented by some arrogant cnuts.
They usually are able to sort you out though. Just don't get into long debates with them, as, like I said, they can be arrogant w@nkers.
Bit cheeky of apple tbh.
You spend all that cash on the thing & then you need to pay if you need to call their tech helpline
So, they set up a forum where users help each other & apple seem to get a free help desk, as it were

davedecay wrote:I buy up old/dead iPods, if you have any of them laying around.

you can see the different models here:
http://www.everyipod.com/

3rd gen is the only one w/ the 4 buttons above the wheel
4th gen is B/W with grey wheel
ipod 'photo' is 4th gen with color screen
ipod 'video' is 5th and 5.5 gen

sounds like your problem may be a logic board.
could also be the hard drive. sometimes it takes swapping parts around to suss it. i've done a bunch of them.

4th gen'll be mine then. Any idea how much it'd cost to exchange the hard drive, and how doable/big a risk that actually is for someone who's never done something quite like that?

I'd much like to buy a new one, but they're expensive bastards

A decent MP3 player should be able to appear as a mass storage device after usb-connecting WITHOUT installing any kind of crapintosh itunes or whatever-drivers

itnAklipse wrote:Only listen to live music. Hmmph. The problems kids have today...when i was young, they didn't have stereo music, and if God had wanted us to listen to stereo music he would've given us two years.

Damn, the sounds are spiinning.

I don't know about "two years", but we certainly have "two ears".

And who cares what God wants, I've not seen HIM designing any good audio equipment lately.

Obviousman wrote:

davedecay wrote:I buy up old/dead iPods, if you have any of them laying around.

you can see the different models here:
http://www.everyipod.com/

3rd gen is the only one w/ the 4 buttons above the wheel
4th gen is B/W with grey wheel
ipod 'photo' is 4th gen with color screen
ipod 'video' is 5th and 5.5 gen

sounds like your problem may be a logic board.
could also be the hard drive. sometimes it takes swapping parts around to suss it. i've done a bunch of them.

4th gen'll be mine then. Any idea how much it'd cost to exchange the hard drive, and how doable/big a risk that actually is for someone who's never done something quite like that?

I'd much like to buy a new one, but they're expensive bastards

best luck with good drives (with a warranty) i've found is on eBay. there's a good seller, DISI. they don't always have every size in stock.
http://stores.ebay.com/DISI-Your-Online-Drive-Source

this 30 GB for $58 isn't too bad, plus you up your storage by 10 GB.
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid ... -R&cpc=SCH

i missed out on DISI's stock of 30 GBs for $45 each.

as for how hard... how handy are you with small, delicate things? hardest part is getting the ipod open without scratching it. most plastic tools that you can get work well, just have to pry with force. from then on it's gently does it. the hard drive is simple to swap, it slides off the pins, you move the blue rubber bumpers from old drive to new, and slide the new drive on the pins, only goes on one way. then close it up & connect to PC & reformat away.

Anyone recommend any solutions?

Put simply, when I connect my iPod to the PC (Vista, USB) iTunes crashes and therefore the iPod cannot sync.

Give this a whirl Rob.
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304405

I don't use Vista, so I don't know what your symptoms are.
My advice is to save the library files somewhere safe (i know what a p!ss off it is to put all the songs back on again ).
Dump I tunes completely & re-install the latest version.
Connect it back up with your libary.
Try again to synch.
You may have to reset the thing.
Good luck.

robertzombie wrote:Anyone recommend any solutions?

How cool ist that? Get a taste of what apple is coming next:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

DocSommer wrote:How cool ist that? Get a taste of what apple is coming next:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

Hilarious!

IZ.

I hear they're releasing the iPhone shuffle.

No screen, no buttons, it just calls up random people in your phone-book.

markfiend wrote:I hear they're releasing the iPhone shuffle.

No screen, no buttons, it just calls up random people in your phone-book.

robertzombie wrote:Anyone recommend any solutions?

Put simply, when I connect my iPod to the PC (Vista, USB) iTunes crashes and therefore the iPod cannot sync.

there are plenty of itunes alternatives out there

http://www.google.com/search?q=itunes+r ... 8&oe=UTF-8

Hey Rob.
Did you ever get it fixed?

Fixed it today

Took it to Apple to see an "Apple Genius". He said it's probably a corrupt file so he restored the iPod and told me to delete the music from my iTunes library and then re-add the tracks from the hard-drive. He said iTunes would flag up any corrupt files.
So I did all the stuff he said, iTunes didn't find any corrupt files.
I thought instead of setting the iPod to auto-sync I'd do it manually so I plugged the iPod in and manually synced the library and it all worked!
Still have no idea what caused the problem but hopefully I'll get a few more years out of it!

And I don't have to pay £49 for a replacement!