I know I haven’t posted in a year or so but this bit of information seemed important enough to share.

I was helping a family friend fix their 160GB iPod and Google searches proved fruitless so I thought I’d share the issue as well as how it was fixed.

Setup:

160GB iPod

iMac

Issue:

iPod appears in Finder (equivalent of Windows Explorer) but does not appear in iTunes.

Things tried that didn’t work:

Hard reset.

Disk mode.

Diagnostic mode.

Ejecting the iPod drive that appears in Finder causes iPod to disconnect and then instantly reset, almost as if it ran into a fatal error.

Eventual solution:

In Disk Utility I erased the drive partition and then ejected the iPod drive. The iPod then appeared in iTunes and worked normally including an update.

Possible issue:

The iPod drive appeared to be formatted to FAT and was using up the entire space available on the iPod. Ejecting the disc appeared to cause a problem as there was no space left for the iPod to actually store any media. Also to note, there was no content on the FAT partition; just empty space.