Topic: my iPod just erased itself? Can you help?

[cleantone]

Bloody hell. I had my iPod plugged in for the most of the day, firewire connection through MOTU audio hardware (if that matters). It was on the MOTU 896 unit which was a bit warm. I noticed a few minutes ago that iTunes was telling me it could not read the iPod and to click to revert to whatever. It had been mounted and I even added a bit of music to it a few hours ago. So I ejected it without resetting to factory defaults. I shut it off and turned it on. Freegin empty? WTF? Before I do anything to it I was hoping someone knows something that would allow it to resee the 20gigs of music on it. Fortunatly not much if anything was critical. All of my music is backed up on DVDR and CDR. But it is a pain in the ass. Anyone?

[Shawn]

reset it... flip the hold switch back and forth a few times and then hold down the menu and center button. you should see the apple logo and it will take a minute to turn back on.

if that doesn't work plug it back into a PC and remove it again.

[cleantone]

Yeah, I tried that. I have had it lock up before and recover fine. My generation needs to hold the conter button and menu to reset. This didn't help for this situation. It was fine today. Didn't lock up or freeze. Just all of a sudden it was saying there is no podcasts, albums, or artists on it at all. Maybe I accidently selected all of the artists and deleted without meaning to. I doubt it highly. I wonder if diskwarrior or tech tools pro would do anything for it.

[shane]

While this may not be a great solution for I thought I would just share my experience.  I have a 60gb iPod and at the the time a Toshiba laptop.  I had about 40gbs of music on my iPod and about three times a week when diconnecting my iPod it would erase the entire thing and I'd have to load it all over again.  Luckily I kept all the music in iTunes so I could just drag and drop it but still it takes some time and I can't stand it when something doesn't work like its supposed to.  Last November I bought a Mac and haven't had the problem since.

[willndmb]

i assume you don't have the files in iTunes anymore based on the fact you want to recover them??
is it poss you changed the prefs to automatically update and when you plugged it in it then erased everything
i would double check just in case

[cleantone]

Well, I am on a Mac and have used this Mac with this iPod for years. So that is not it. I also just checked all around iTunes for a setting that would have told it to update and I don't think that happened. I really think it may have overheated. There is a VERY SMALL chance that I accidently selected everything on the iPod and hit delete. I REALLY doubt that though.

I barely keep any music on my iTunes. The volume of data that goes on and off of my Mac is insane. I have 10,000's of CD's and DVD's. It will be a long while until media is cheap enough, or I am rich enough to have it all on some sort of server setup. There was minmal music on the iPod that was not backed up somewhere, maybe a few tunes if any. It is just fucking strange that all day it was plugged in and I added music and podcasts. Then a few hours later when I went to eject it to take with me, it was empty. All booted up and running but not one song, artist, or podcast on it. It was pretty warm. It may have overheated. I googled and found some people running into this problem that could use Terminal to go in and get the music. Then it would have to be renamed and organized. I don't know how to do that at all anyway. I might try diskwarrior or something if I don't find a safer bet soon. Thanks guys.