Music Lover in Grave Danger!

[mendali]

Hi everyone, this is my first post to this board. I use an Apple iBook G4 (I got it in December) which currently is running OS 10.3.9. This computer came with a 30 GB hard drive, which isn't enough to hold all my music, so I kept the 80 GB hard drive from my OLD computer (iMac G3) and put it in a Firewire enclosure. I did not reformat it. This is important later.

I've had an iPod since June 2003 which I LOVE, but it's been starting to show its age. So I decided to restore the iPod to its factory settings, wipe it clean, etc. and see if that made a difference in its performance/battery life. Since my iBook only has one Firewire port, I plug my external drive into that, and my iPod into the external drive. This has worked just fine for months, but for some reason, when I had it plugged into my external drive and tried to restore the iPod, all hell broke loose.

The restoration process worked just fine -- the iPod was erased and completely reset. However, something totally screwed up my Firewire drive and now it won't show up on my desktop. This all happened last night; I contacted some techie family members who gave me some ideas (Disk Utility, etc.) but none of that worked, so I pulled out Disk Warrior and ran that. It worked! My hard drive was fixed (so I thought) and I could listen to all my wonderful music again. (I'm a musician myself... my iTunes contains many unreleased and self-recorded items which I foolishly didn't start backing up until last month, so if I can't restore these, they will literally be lost forever.)

I decided that I had better try to get as much onto my iPod as possible, so I started moving my music files BACK to the iPod, and in the process, the external drive disappeared from my desktop AGAIN. THIS time when I ran Disk Warrior, it didn't work. It recommended that I preview the new directory, but this didn't work (I clicked Preview and nothing happened). So now I'm worried because all of my data may be completely lost. I just need access to it once more to back things up on CD, then I'll reformat the thing. Any pointers?

If you need more details about this story, let me know...

 

[emeraldice]

What's the model of the iPod...I know it doesn't help, but we could probably fix the battery life of the iPod...

Umk, let me get this straight - so your iPod is blank, and your external HD has problems.

First, leave the iPod out of this. We can fix that later, the most important thing is the HD. As long as we don't have to save data or hardware, the iPod is safe. Is there data on the iPod?

Second - do you have another PC, or a mac? I would try another mac, and if that doesn't work, try a PC. If it doesn't show up on either of those, I don't know what to do.

Once you have a computer that reconigzes your HD, you should be able to run recovery programs on it...I don't know if that will be able to happen on the PC, mainly because mac and PC file systems are different.

Lastly, I had my iPod time out when i was updating. it would dissappear, and reappear. I beleive it was because of either a faulty firewire card or the faulty drivers. I would try reloading them on your mac (or your external HD)

good luck.