Itunes saying that my ipod is full when it is empty

Question

Alright, so let me give you the backstory to this. First off, I have the 4G 20-gig IPod Photo that I bought in January of this year.
So about a week ago, my Ipod started glitching, namely pausing for about ten seconds whenever a song that had album artwork came on (roughly half of my library has artwork). It would play about the first second of a song and not show the artwork, and then pause for about ten seconds. During these ten seconds, the Ipod wouldn't respond at all and then everything would be back to normal. The funny thing about this was that this only occured when I skipped ahead to a song, so if I was listening to an album with artwork all the way through there would be no problems, but if I skipped a song it would freeze. The other funny thing was that this happened only with songs that had album art. Songs that didn't have album art worked fine with no problems.
I decided that I would just take all of the album art off the Ipod next time I put it in Itunes, no biggie. But when I put it in the computer, the Ipod was only recognized by the computer as a harddrive and not Itunes itself. I could charge it but not update it. I looked up the forums and did everything to no avail..put it in disk mode, reset it, restarted the computer, reinstalled Itunes, etc....It had a message saying that I needed to reformat my Ipod with the Ipod Updater, so I restored it back to factory conditions and after two tries, it was now recognized by Itunes.
But now there's a new problem.
Although when I go to my Ipod it says that it is empty, when I look at my Ipod in Itunes, it says that it has 18.5 G's of music on it, what it had before all of this happened. I cannot see any of this music when I look at my Ipod, and I cannot see any of this music when I look at my Ipod through Itunes (it just states that it has 18.5 G's of music on it). I looked at the Ipod through My Computer and it also said that it had 18.5 Gs occupied on it.
So after all of this frustration, I'm not sure how to handle this. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

If your iPod is recognized in "my computer", changing the drive letter can sometimes resolve this issue.
Click on control panel/admin tools/computer management/disk management/right click on the iPod to re-assign the drive letter.
Choose something lower down the alphabet, say 'M' or something similar.
The iPod can be confused by any other storage devices assigned a similar drive letter even though they may not connected at the same time.