[Fiddytree]

Last night I had a stupid accident that I regret taking part in. While my ipod was plugged into my mac, i had somehow tripped over the ipod, making it disconnect from the cradle. When I plugged it back in, neither the finder nor itunes would recognize it.

I knew that I would probably need to restore it, so I made a list as to what songs I needed to grab again (since I had all the music on the player itself), and I decided to restore today. The ipod works fine by itself, but it will not work at all on my mac. I heard that it is a good idea to delete the ipod and itunes preferences, so I did that.

I have run through the steps of trying to retore the ipod, but on the ipod software updater seems to get that nice beachball everytime I try to restore it (which hasn't been many because im struggling to even get a error dialog box telling me that an external device has readable volumes). so i then hunted for a way to restore off the ipod itself, and I didn't find anything there.

I have also done a lot of reconnecting and disconnected of ipods, firewire ports, computer...also i have restarted the ipod quite a bit and it hasn't done my will.
Maybe someone can help me?

This is a Gen 3 15 Gig ipod, Mac OS X 10.2.8

[Nebrie]

Try seeing if it'll connect to another Mac.

[hldan]

Looks like he just crimped the firewire cable. In most cases that is the problem. Try a new cable first. If you live near an Apple retail store or an Apple reseller see if they have an available cable for you to try out. See if the iPod will connect with one of the store's demo computers and if so then problem solved.
Good luck.

[BurpetheadX]

When your iPod is booting, press and hold the forward and rewind buttons. This should boot it into firewire disk mode. Now plug it in, and re-initialize it with Disk Utility. Dismount it, and unplug it. Now open the restore application and plug it in. Try it out. You might have to reset it by holding down the menu and play buttons after initilizing it, not to sure.