iPod worked fine, now it won't even after reformatting
 

Hi: I've got a 160GB iPod classic (5th gen I think) that worked fine for several months -- I initially set it up with gtkpod and used rhythmbox to transfer songs. One day I was moving a bunch (maybe 500) of songs to the iPod, and my computer froze up. When I rebooted, the iPod said I didn't have any music (the files were still on the iPod, the iPod just wasn't "seeing" them). So I backed everything up and reformatted my iPod. I tried to set it back up w/ gtkpod and, after some configuring, got it to work with some success.

If I move over songs one at a time, they work OK. I can navigate to them, play them etc. But if I try and move a few over at a time (say, 20), the files get transfered to the iPod (i.e. they take up hard disk space), but I can't navigate to them on the iPod or play them. I've tried reformatting the iPod several times by right clicking on the iPod icon and hitting 'format.' When I do that, the iPod gets reformatted and then it immediately mounts to "media/whatever I named the iPod" when I hit 'format.' I don't know if this could be part of the problem? I even tried reinstalling gtkpod...

I'm really at a loss - I've tried a ton of things just by looking through other people's past issues, but I haven't been able to find one about this specific problem.

Thanks for your time...I'm really not all that savvy with linux if you couldn't tell already...

Travis

Hello and welcome to LQ,
When reformatting the iPod, which filesystem did you chose? I've found this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod please read the part about the iPod-filesystems.
Sometimes the transfer of files onto an USB-device is very slow. This may depend on how the device is mounted (buffered or unbuffered). I'd suggest to read the manpage for the mount command and search for "buffer".

Markus

Thanks for your time...what I actually did was run the iPod updater on a windows machine, then run the 'system restore' function in iTunes, and that cleared up my problem.

Thanks again