Ipod updater not giving update option

Question

so something dumb happened with my 3rd gen ipod...i put some more cds on my ipod. Ejected the ipod. Got in my car and there were no songs on my ipod at all. However, it still says that i've used 10.4GB. It would be real cool if i didn't have to reset my ipod. Is there anyway to do so?

Answer 1

Reset is like rebooting - doesn't do anything bad.
          Restore is reformating - your music will be lost.
          If you want to see if your music is actually there or gone, try this:
Connect your iPod to your computer and enable it to be used as a disk - you want the iPod icon to be showing on your desktop.
Open the Terminal App (Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
Type:cd[space] - then drag the iPod icon into the Terminal window - then hit [return].
Type: ls -la - this shows you the directory structure of the iPod.
Your music will be in the iPod_Control directory. To get to it type:cd iPod_Control[return].
Check contents of iPod_Control directory using ls (or ls -la) (that's a lower case "L", BTW)
Music is in the Music folder - should have lots of items in it.
To check, type: cd Music[return]:ls -la
At this point, you should see lots of directories: F00, F01,F02,F03 ...if those aren't there, your music isn't there.
You can check a few of those to be sure that each directory has something in it.
          If you can see your music on the iPod, then you need to determine why it isn't playing. If you don't see it, then that explains why it doesn't play - it's not there - and you need to resolve why it didn't transfer.