iPod not registering on my Mac. Please help.

[Falsey]

I would absolutely love any help I can get.

I wanted to transfer a file using my iPod (80GB classic) from my Mac to a PC, and when I plugged it into the PC it told me I had to format it. Now I went ahead and did this seeing as I didn't really care about all the songs because my iTunes library would resync with it easily enough.

But now I plug it into the Mac and it doesn't even register as an iPod. It comes up with an Untitled drive on the desktop and itunes pops up but doesnt register that an ipod is plugged in. I read about the problem on the apple website and it told me to restore it, which is just ridiculous seeing as the whole problem is that it won't register in itunes and thus i cant restore it. Each time i eject the ipod it briefly shows the apple logo before going to the language select screen. And in its settings it says I have 0kb available.

Please, any help would be incredibly appreciated.

[tonym911]

As you can see from the thread immediately below yours, I have a similar problem, or possibly worse as my Shuffle doesn't even appear on my MacBook Pro. It shows up as a hard drive icon on two other older Macs we've got here but as you say the Apple website is absolutely hopeless. Not much help to you I know but I thought it might make you feel a bit better to know you're not alone. I'm surprised none of the experts on this website seem to know the answer either.

[nixgeek]

The reason this is happening is because the iPod needs to be formatted for PC (in other words, using an MS-DOS FAT filesystem) when connected to a Windows computer. Windows can't read the iPod when it's formatted for use on a Mac (which is when the iPod is formatted using the HFS filesystem). The same thing happens for some reason when it's the other way around (which is weird since the Mac can read and write to FAT filesystems).

Tonym911, again it's possible that your shuffle is formatted using a FAT filesystem and it's set to be mounted as a hard disk (the latter can be set in iTunes to do this or not). Control-click on the iPod that's mounted on the desktop and select "Get Info". Once the information on the iPod comes up, it should tell you if it's formatted FAT (for PC) or HFS (for Macintosh).

[Falsey]

Thanks a bunch for the replies guys. I sorted it out through something which I can't believe I didn't already think of. I just installed iTunes on the PC and then ran the restore from there. Now I can use it on both computers.

I hope maybe this help you too tony. Best of luck.

[tonym911]

No joy at my end I'm afraid. The problem I've got is that I can't do anything to restore or reformat the Shuffle from FAT to HFS (which apparently is what it needs) because it never appears in iTunes no matter what I do. It doesn't appear AT ALL on my Leopard MacBook Pro. On an older MacBook running 10.4.11 it appears as a 'NO NAME' hard drive and disc icon 'AMT_CDROM' on the Desktop. That's as much as I can get it to do. I've tried dragging both icons to the iTunes icon on the Dock, nothing happens, it never shows up as a source in iTunes, which makes it a bit difficult to follow Apple instructions to reset/restore etc. Previous owner (I bought it off ebay) insists he never used the Shuffle, just go it out of packaging then put it away again, so it shouldn't be registered to his machine. Anybody know how I can reformat the hard drive icon into HFS? Thanks.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Tony:

Look at my reply in this other thread of yours:

Shuffle not appearing on Mac

I believe the problem is that it's not really an iPod shuffle; it's an imitation MP3 player.