ipod not restoring

[Jamiegs]

My friend's 3G ipod was not being recognised in itunes or the desktop. I took over my Macbook and my 4G ipod. My ipod was recognised on his emac and his was not recognised on the Macbook confirming the problem was on the ipod. I took his ipod home to check it with my USB2 cable. The ipod was recognised both in itunes and the desktop.

However when I tried to restore it I was told that I had to use the firewire cable and then the ipod wasn't recognised. I used bootcamp and managed to restore it with windows but this now formatted it in windows format. In Mac OSX I used disk utility to format the disk hoping that by wiping it it would allow it to use firewire to restore it under Mac OSX. At present it isn't recogised under Mac OSX with firewire / USB at all even under disk mode.

I replaced the battery as it hadn't been holding much charge and I thought this may be the reason that firewire wasn't working, but it hasn't made a difference.

The only way it can currently be recognised is under disk mode with usb under xp - it tries to restore and update but only gets a short way then gives up with an error message. The ipod only displays the apple icon. I thought that if i could format the ipod in XP to the mac format then I might be able to see and restore it osx. Any ideas on how to do this?

[sinclair_tm]

well, once you got it to win format, you should of left it there, it would of worked on the mac with no problem. but the main thing is you formatted it with the disk utility, which is what killed it as an ipod. the disk has to formatted a special way for it to be seen as an ipod by the computer, and not just a hard drive. but with the issues it had before, i'm inclined to think that either the hard drive is going, or the hard drive controller and/or computer interface is bad, which means the ipod is no more.

[eric2006]

OS X should be able to read most any format your PC can throw at it, but if your mac cannot read it, and the PC has problems halfway through, it's probably a hard drive going. Try running the diagnostics to see if it finds any problems.