IPod cannot be read or written to

Question

I uploaded several new albums (about 130 songs) to my 30G iPod two days ago. But, as I was listening through them, I noticed the iPod had the tendency to arbitrarily skip to the next track or pause the song and refuse to continue playing it. It also never did it twice to the same song in the same place.
To solve this problem, I decided to set the iPod to manual update, remove the problem songs and re-upload them to the iPod (since they worked perfectly in iTunes, I knew the songs themselves weren't the issue.)
But, moments after I dragged-and-dropped them into the iPod icon, I got an error message that read "The iPod, IPOD cannot be updated because it cannot be read from or written to." I had never gotten such an error message, but I was sure it was just a minor fault in the program. But, when I tried to eject the iPod, I got another error message that read "The iPod cannot be ejected because it is in use by another program." So, I closed every application that was running and tried ejecting it from the Mac desktop. But, I got the same error message. So, I restarted the computer in hopes of closing any programs that might've been running in the background that I was unaware of. But, all the same error messages prevailed even after doing so. Finally, I decided that restoring the iPod to factory settings would do the trick. It is, after all, supposed to be a failsafe to anything that could cause trouble with an iPod's software.
But, when i tried restoring, the same message regarding the iPod's inability to be read or written to came up.
Next, I shut down the Mac and connected the iPod to the Window's desktop in the living room to try and restore it that way. And indeed, it worked. I then reconnected the iPod to the Mac and tried syncing all 4,667 of my songs to it. But, when it got a bit past 1,000 songs, the familiar error that had kept me from updating and restoring it before came up. And from that point on, I was again unable to do anything to change any kind of setting or information on the iPod via the Mac.
So, I restored it using the desktop again.. and so on ad infinitum for the past couple days.
I feel like I've tried everything I know to do. Is there any step I can take to remedy this situation short of calling for support from apple?

Answer 1

I had very similar problems. I think I have the solution.
The problem that I was having was that I had plugged the iPod into a 4-port USB 2.0 hub, manufactured by Belkin, and sold at the Apple stores. Apparently, there wasn't enough power getting to the iPod to write to it.
It never occurred to me that this might be a problem because the hub worked fine with my 5+ year old iPod.
So when I kept having problems with my new iPod classic, I thought I had bought a defective iPod. (It was a refurb). So I went and bought a brand new iPod. Similar problem. Except with the new one, I couldn't even get the iPod to be recognized by the computer. So as a shot in the dark, I unplugged it from the Belkin hub and plugged it directly into the computer. It worked perfectly. I wondered if that was, in fact, the problem with the refurbished iPod, so I tried syncing that one as well. It worked perfectly as well.
It's extremely frustrating for several reasons: First, its inconceivable that they would sell this hub at the Apple store if it is not fully compatible with all Apple products. Second, the error messages I kept getting had nothing to do whatsoever with the actual problem, which further led me and the Apple tech people on a wild goose chase trying to diagnose the problem. Third, Apple doesn't seem to acknowledge this problem. And its especially troublesome because the hub would be the last thing you would think of as being the problem. I've had this hub for 6 months and its never been a problem with any of my other hardware. And since Apple is selling it at their stores, you'd never suspect it wouldn't be compatible with the crown jewel of Apple products, the iPod.
So, try plugging the iPod directly into the computer and see what happens. And if this works, then call up Apple Tech Support and rip them a new one for both causing and then refusing to recognize this problem.