iTunes 7 broke my iPod Nano

:: Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 @ 2:58:48 am

:: Tags: Computers, Music

iTunes 7 must have been upset with me after I went on a rant about it not long ago. An hour ago, I plugged my little iPod Nano into my Mac Pro, and iTunes 7 rendered the poor thing completely inoperable. It took quite a bit of work to resuscitate it…

iPod Nano, originally uploaded by echeng.

This is roughly real-time, as I try to fix it:

My Mac doesn’t recognize the thing at all — it does absolutely nothing when I plug it in, even in forced disk mode. iTunes Windows detects a “corrupted” iPod and tries to restore it, failing each time. When I inspect the drive in Windows XP Disk Management, it shows up as “Unreadable”, so manual re-formatting is impossible.

I rebooted my PC and ran iTunes 7 again. I ran a restore, but the iPod disappeared from iTunes and wouldn’t come back. This time, the Nano showed up in Disk Management, and I was able to re-format it with a FAT32 file system.

iTunes 7 (both platforms) now states, “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode. You must restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes.” After this, iTunes 7 for Windows refuses to recognize it, but iTunes 7 for Mac properly recognizes it as having a Windows file system.

iTunes Mac did a proper restore! I’m going to try to fill the Nano with music…

OK, it works now.

I can’t believe I just had to go through that!

This instance of Nano death isn’t an isolated incident. If you do web searches, you will find other instances of iTunes 7 killing Nanos.

So, Victor… now can I officially declare iTunes 7 to be a piece of crap? The fact that iTunes 7 breaks iPods is pretty bad!

— UPDATE —

Many Windows users have had luck re-mapping the iPod to a different drive letter. Read the comments for details…

Popularity: 15% | Oakland, CA | link | trackback | Sep 23, 2006 02:58:48

:: 34 comments (rss)

1. posted by Mike V on Sat, September 23, 2006 @ 5:02 am

   Mac eh?!?

   can i send you some more tylenol?

2. posted by echeng on Sat, September 23, 2006 @ 10:24 am

   Come on, Mike. You’re not being helpful. iTunes 7 on Windows is far worse than the same on Mac.

3. posted by Mike V on Sun, September 24, 2006 @ 5:08 am

   ummm.. i am not here to be helpful, i am the peanut gallery for entertaining but useless comments….

   :D

   don’t even know what version mine is, only ever used it to download 2 podcasts from Mary Lynne…. 1.9kb the other day! smokin!

4. posted by Peter on Mon, September 25, 2006 @ 2:51 am

   Just found this post online, I have a similar problem with iTunes 7 on a PC. My iPOD is fine. Never had any trouble with it - until I upgraded to iTune 7, which thinks my iPod is in some constant state of recovery mode. Even after I do recover it, iTunes will not play ball.

   I’m about to reinstall iTune 6.

5. posted by sd on Mon, September 25, 2006 @ 11:26 am

   Eric, when I upgraded to iTunes 7, the first time I used my iPod nano it had to upgrade the software, so it took about five minutes or so to do that, and it couldn’t be taken out either, (the nano screen says this too). I thought it might have frozen because it was taking so long to upgrade but it didn’t, it just was updating everything to the new features of iTunes 7. No problems here.

6. posted by Caroline :) on Mon, September 25, 2006 @ 3:45 pm

   is that a standard cautionary notice on all ipod nanos? (couldn’t be?!) or did you specify that to be there? hahahahah.

7. posted by echeng on Tue, September 26, 2006 @ 2:30 pm

   sd: glad you had luck with your upgrade. upon software “upgrade” for me, iTunes 7 made my nano inoperable.

8. posted by J on Thu, October 05, 2006 @ 2:04 pm

   Broke my mini. But I can’t get it going again. And I have a mac, tried everything. :(

9. posted by kieren on Fri, October 06, 2006 @ 5:38 am

   Hi,

   Just wanted to let you know that I was having similar problems to Eric with my iPod Nano on a PC. However I eventually discovered that the problem was with Windows Disk Management and mapped drives that are automatically created on my PC at work. When the iPod was attached it was given the same drive letter as one of the mapped drives. Using the disk management utility, I forced windows to assign a different drive letter to the iPod and from that moment on, it was fine. Problem solved.

   Hope that helps anyone with a similar issue.

10. posted by Darn on Wed, October 18, 2006 @ 5:44 am

    Just want to verify what the last poster said…

    My ipod works fine (whatever that means). I use my home comp as the ‘pods ‘home base’ and primary sync comp. When at work, i plug her in and enable manual management and play music thru itunes. I have to do it this way because my library is stored at home.

    Yesterday I was fooling around with the logon scripts in my office and mapped some new drive letters. This morning, I plugged her in at work (as usual) and received the “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode. You must restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes.”

    Wow, did I pull my hair out!! I was listening to the pod with no problems on the subway, and now it’s konking out!!

    I was about to give up when I read Kieren’s post. After reading it, i instantly remembered all of the drive letter bullhockey I was playing around with yesterday.

    Running computer management was a bit tricky. Here’s what I had to do in order to re-assign the drive letter:

    Start -> Run -> compmgmt.msc Drill down ‘Storage’, highlight Disk Management Plug ipod in. Wait. Make sure the computer management window is the topmost window. If you don’t, you won’t be able to get in there and change the drive letter of your ipod. The ipod will disappear out of the computer management window once itunes rejects it, or accepts your acknowledgement that it’s rejecting it. Then I think i right clicked on the volume (or something) and changed the drive letter. Just to make sure windows remembered my change, I ejected the pod and plugged it in again. Looks like it was mapped to the letter I had specified. Don’t know if this setting will hold after a reboot/cold boot.

    Anyway people, check this…ipod seems to want to take a drive letter closest to your fixed volumes. At work, I have a C and E internal HD, so Ipod was looking for F:. But F: was mapped to the porn directory on my company’s server, so I got the error (NO, NOT PORN. heheheh). Now I forced ipod to take G:. I guess the best way to avoid this issue on a network like this is to keep all the low letters (A->G or something) reserved for your local comp, and the high letters (Z -> M or whatever) for mapped network drives.

    Rock on in Lebanon!

11. posted by Jodi on Wed, November 01, 2006 @ 2:34 pm

    Just wanted to say thanks for the help and note that changing the drive letter worked for me too. Hurray! I’d also like to complain that in iTunes 7, I have to show the browser every time I plug in my iPod…in previous versions it remembered this setting. I find it annoying.

12. posted by AlaN on Tue, November 07, 2006 @ 12:05 pm

    via device manager (win xp), uninstall ipod and then scan for hardware changes w/o removing ipod. worked great.

13. posted by Adel on Sun, November 26, 2006 @ 6:35 pm

    Device Manager; deleted USB Mas Storage Device related to iPod (you’ll find it in properties). Took out iPod and re-inserted (it might work rescan as alan posted)

14. posted by skinny_puppy on Wed, December 13, 2006 @ 9:13 am

    That drive letter re-mapping also worked for me, great tip!

15. posted by Tombombidil on Wed, January 03, 2007 @ 7:50 pm

    Thank you all for this fix, it was driving me, and a friend who works for apple, crazy. all I had to do was unmount a network drive and the thing worked fine. thank you all again for making life easier.

16. posted by Daniel Tull on Wed, April 11, 2007 @ 12:41 pm

    [...] So my brother has had his iPod nano since they came out, and recently has been having problems with it. I took a look at it and found out it appears to have the same error as this guy, although it appears he needed to use Windows to reformat it and my brother (and his iTunes equipped Windows laptop) left. Well, I need to go to Southampton Apple Store to buy a couple hard drives, so I booked an appointment with a genius and headed out. [...]

17. posted by Jose Martinez on Fri, April 20, 2007 @ 10:41 am

    I had the same ‘restore’ problem. The Disk Management letter change did the trick.

18. posted by Derek Knight on Sat, April 21, 2007 @ 2:08 am

    I had the same problem today - and it’s now six months since the first reported case. I just installed a new version of iTunes (7.1.1.5). Again remapping a network drive - in my case G: fixed the problem. Apple seem to have dropped the ball on this one

19. posted by Josh on Tue, April 24, 2007 @ 9:39 pm

    So glad I found this info here…Apple’s site is useless.

    I mapped a G: drive & the iTunes/iPod is so inflexible it just couldn’t hack it. Too bad I found it after it zeroed all the bits. It’ll be fun for hours recopying it all…ah well…

20. posted by smithee on Tue, May 08, 2007 @ 10:14 pm

    Thanks, the disk management trick help me, too.

21. posted by Jayboogie70 on Wed, May 09, 2007 @ 7:49 am

    I need some assistance in mapping the drive letter to see if this works for me. Cans someone help

22. posted by mundofr on Mon, May 28, 2007 @ 10:42 pm

    wow! i had really hard time trying to change the letter.. i always clcked on change not remove and then add, so everytime i tried to change it the app crashed, but i removed the letter and then added it and it worked :D

    thanks to all!

23. posted by Bryan Triplett on Sun, June 17, 2007 @ 5:59 pm

    Thanks for the drive mapping hint. Worked perfectly for me. We had 2 ipods with bad restore symptoms. Problem went away immediately when I unmapped my local network drive letter G:

24. posted by Wayne Brown on Thu, July 12, 2007 @ 5:59 pm

    Change of drive letter in disk manager worked for me, too. Original problem appeared when I attempted to dock my nano in the viewsonic port. This is a pretty stupid gadget anyway, but I used it “because it was there” :-{

25. posted by Leanne on Tue, July 17, 2007 @ 2:50 am

    Why do you think it’s happening? It almost feels like it only happens to PC formatted iPod Nanos.

    Thanks for the tip, btw.

26. posted by Season on Wed, July 25, 2007 @ 2:48 pm

    i need some help changing the drive letter in disk management, can someone give me a hand?

27. posted by vik on Wed, August 15, 2007 @ 4:12 am

    For people who’ve tried the drive letter solution, but are still having problems with their ipod nanos:

    a. Force the ipod nano into disk mode More info: http://docs.info.apple.com/art.....tnum=93651

    b. Formating the ipod nano using Windows as a FAT32 drive

    c. Restoring the ipod nano using iTunes 7.0 or later

    I tried everything including the drive letter change (which didn’t help), but after 3 hours of extensive research, the above three steps put my ipod back on track and its working fine now.

28. posted by NANO on Thu, October 04, 2007 @ 5:44 pm

    my nano had the message displayed before i hooked it up what happened?It displayed that for some reason

29. posted by Nestor on Sun, January 06, 2008 @ 9:35 am

    Hi Nestor from Costa Rica… great tip Darn; the renaming thing really worked for me!

    thanks!

30. posted by Erika on Wed, February 20, 2008 @ 2:32 pm

    kieren is a lifesaver! I was having the same issue, all of a sudden itunes was detecting my ipod in recovery mode. turned out a new driver was installed and it just so happened to use the same drive letter that was designated for my ipod. i reassinged the drive letter for the new driver, and it works perfectly now! no need to restore my ipod or anything. thank goodness, as i would’ve lost a lot of songs.

31. posted by Chris on Mon, March 24, 2008 @ 9:53 am

    This too (changing the mapping to G drive) fixed my iPod Nano issue. Thanks for the fix..would be nice if Apple actually had this on their site..or at least fixed. This was with iTunes version 7.6.1.9 and Nano sw version 1.1.3

32. posted by Vanessa on Fri, July 18, 2008 @ 3:56 am

    Has anyone tried the mapping to the G-drive fix with Windows Vista? Please help! I don’t know how to get to disk management and I am leaving for a week long trip today…what horrible timing to lose my nano.

33. posted by Vanessa on Fri, July 18, 2008 @ 5:00 am

    I figured out how to change drive letter in Windows Vista and my nano is still dead. :-( Right click on my computer and select manage will get you to disk management (FYI) Any other thoughts are greatly appreciated! I also updated the drivers..still no luck.

34. posted by FurBall on Fri, November 07, 2008 @ 12:11 pm

    Changing the drive letter worked PERFECTLY FINE! YAY! AWESOME.

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