Iphone 3gs wont restore or sync music on my computer, driving me crazy!!

Question

hi everyone, just going to post my problem here and see if anyone has any advice or tips for me.
i have an iphone 3GS and am using a pc with windows xp. i have never been able to sync my phone with itunes 9 and above so after updating software on my iphone i had to go back to itunes 8.2 wich was fine. when iphone os4 was released i updated itunes to 9.2 and tried to install the new hardware, didnt work and i needed to restore my iphone. couldnt do this on my pc so took the phone to my parents computer and restored it fine on there. get back home and plugged my iphone, sync'd it up with a backup no problems but when i tried to sync music it gives me an error 'could not sync iphone, the disk could not be read'. it does the backup fine and gets to syncing the first song, gets halfway through that first one and sits there for 20 minutes before bringing up this error.
i have been googling this for days trying to find a solution have tried uninstalling itunes, reinstalling, but nothing seems to fix it. i am able to sync the music from my parents computer onto the iphone but would really like to use my own music collection!! any tips would be VERY appreciated.
thanks

Answer 1

OK it sounds like the USB ports re OK, the only other thing I would mention with them, for the moment, make sure you are using the ones on the back of the computer.
Without knowing your machine, sometimes the USB ports on the front are linked via card readers or are front ports on the motherboard, etc and are not high power ports, where as the ones on the back are definitely high power ports.
I have seen many times over the years where clients have come to me saying their external hard drives are faulty, and they plugging them into low power USB ports or into USB hubs and they connect fine, but once they start transferring a lot of information, the lock up or fail during the process as the voltage is dragged down.
I don't know if that would make a difference to a nano, I don't have one of them, but I would expect a nano and iphone to need similar power requirements when syncing.
So at the moment, play it safe and just use the ones on the back until we get the issue solved.
We also need to discount any conflicts between what you have installed on your PC and against iTunes. I don't think this is going to be an issue as you are already syncing another device, but at the same time we need to eliminate the possibility.
If you know how to use MSCONFIG thats good but not essential. We want to stop startup items and services that are not Apple, these include Security Software, CD/DVD software and pretty much anything else you have installed on your computer during it's life. Most software manufacture's write code into their software to start up parts of it when starting your computer. Some of it is essential, eg Security, most of it is a waste of time. The reason they do it is so their software will start up quickly when you want to use it, but if you rarely use it, then all it is really doing is slowing down the boot time of the computer.
So Apple have this trouble shooting page here http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1275 and I need you to go through this and follow the steps so as we can discount this part.
Now be careful, write down what you are turning off, so as later you know what to turn back on and also be aware that you will also be temporarily turn off your security software so exercise some caution and don't open attachments on emails etc while its off.
If you find that the phone now syncs, with these startup items and services turn off, then we know we have a software conflict, and then you start turning things back on one by one, starting with your security software and testing the syncing each time.
Now I have to go, Germany and Argentina are about to start their game, so good luck and get back to me with you results.