Ipod Wont Sync My Music in itunes

Question

Ok big problem. I have all my music saved onto a 120Gig Western digital Portable Hard drive. i have an 80gig ipod. ive had it for about 5-6 months. i am now having a problem where it wont sync. what happends is that all of my music is in the itunes library. when i try to sync my ipod, none of the music syncs and all of the locations of the original file become lost. when i go into my hard drive and look, all of the files are missing. but when i either unplug the hard drive or restart my comp all of my music is there again. if i try again it does the same thing over and over. any suggestions? t would be appreciated. thanks.

Answer 1

In answer to your last question, no - your iPod is not a goner, but you need to work out what has happened first so that it doesn't happen again. I'm guessing that if you look at "Other" on your iPod you may find it's quite large.
Look on your iPod, go to the Settings menu and choose the About option; on that first display the graphic should show lots of blue (audio), some darker blue (video), some yellow/orange (photos if you have any) and a small amount of orange/red (other). That's the sequence, don't worry if the colours are slightly off or not there. If the last one - other is larger than the audio then that's where your storage has gone!
I still think that your PC has allocated a different letter to the external hard drive compared to when you previously added the music. Then, when the iPod cannot find the music on your PC when synced, it moves the songs to "other". Have you checked to make sure there are no "rogue" drive letters still allocated and have you ruled out the possibility of connecting the hard drive in another sequence when connecting up other USB devices? (As I mentioned in my last post.) Once you have done that, then look in iTunes.
If I understand you correctly, only some of the songs (in iTunes) have an exclamation mark against them, while some do not, is that correct? If so, it means that iTunes cannot find the location of ones with exclamation marks. So look at some of the songs that do not have an exclamation mark and try the *Get info/Where* to find out where iTunes thinks they are. Then check to see if the same drive letter is allocated to the hard drive when you connect it. They should be the same letter, are they?
If not, that's been the problem. If they are the same, try "asking" iTunes to see if it can now find the location of one of the missing tracks. (It's possible of course, that some newer added songs were added after the drive letter changed and this will be a problem, but let's hope not!)
So, what's the situation now? If you think the problem is a changed drive letter, make sure that the correct drive letter is now allocated and then ask iTunes to find the missing songs. (Unfortunately, this might be on a song-by-song basis!)
Once you find the missing songs, (or if you don't you will just have to import them again into iTunes.) and your iTunes is now complete again, it's time to sort out the iPod.
Connect up the iPod and on the iTunes Summary screen, use the Restore function. This will restore your iPod to its factory settings and remove everything from it, thus freeing up the missing storage space. then a fresh Sync will add everything back onto the iPod again. As you can appreciate, all this will take a bit of time, which is why you need to understand what happened so you don't have to go through this again.
Let us know how you get on.
Good luck,