"This drive is not ready for use; it's door may be open ..."

Question

Hi.
I recently updated to itunes 7, and then had an issue with a corrupt file on the i-pod (which resulted in chkdsk hanging itself at 27%, always). So I restored the i-pod and that took care of that - chkdsk now says it's fine.
However - it is also empty. My machine and i-tunes recognize it fine upon start-up; however, a short while into a full synch to get my library back on the i-pod, I invariably get the following error message:
"The drive is not ready for use; it's door may be open. Please check drive \Device\Harddisk\DR 3 and make sure that a disk is inserted and that the drive door is closed." The message comes with the options "cancel, ignore and continue", yet the latter two don't make a difference, and even if I choose cancel, itunes keeps trying until it eventually crashes.
This always happens after itunes has synchronized about 1.13 GB (out of 18.55 available).
As far as I can tell, both my system and the iPod are up to date (itunes and windows update say so, anyway). E: is unequivocally and exclusively allocated to the i-pod; changing the settings from "optimize for quick removal" to "optimize for performance" has made no discernible difference.
Any ideas would be very much appreciated.
Thanks.
DELL Inspiron 4150   Windows XP  

Answer 1

Hullo ...
let me follow up on this again. I've followed your advice, de-installed spybot, no change. I looked through the windows support help base, nothing. While trying out different things, I started getting a "delayed write failed" message, and I did some things they suggested (including adjusting the registry - me, adjusting the registry!)and it went away, and now all I get is the "open door" message again.
That is: everything works absolutely fine, I plug in the i-pod (latest version i-tunes and i-pod is up to date), it's recognized instantly by the explorer as well as i-tunes. I've run all scans you can possibly run on it, and it is fine (no corrupt files, nothing). I've restored it twice through i-tunes, twice through the explorer. I've changed the drive letter.
It starts the synch fine (it's still almost empty after the last restore), but at some point, I get the error message. Interestingly enough, *up to* that point, it'll synch fine - I can disconnect it and play on it whatever's been synched thus far. I can also modify my i-tunes settings and preferences, all of which i-tunes will recognize and adhere to. It is just unwilling to put more than 1GB of stuff onto my 20GB i-pod.
Something I've noticed is that it is sometimes indicating apparently faulty charges in the beginning (though that is quickly corrected once the synch starts), as in, it'll recognize a certain amount of audio files, but also claim a random amount of "other" files, which should not be there (apart from the 30MB or so of genuine i-pod software).
Anyhow. I haven't seen any solutions to this on the forums or in the apple help files, but people appear to be having this problem still. Any ideas or input would be very much appreciated ...
Thanks.