Music takes up space on the iPod, but can't be found

Question

I bought a new 60GB iPod on Saturday. On Sunday I got it working fine with my PC. I was listening to it in bed.
On Monday morning, the iPod looked normal, but I could noot find any songs on it.
I tried to resync, and got a range of error messages.
I have followed the advice here and on the Apple site, so I now have reinstalled iPod and iTunes. But I still have one problem left.
When I connect to iTunes, the iPod is automatically updated. I then get the message OK to disconnect and the iPod screen shows its home menu. But when I search through the iPod, nothing is there. iTunes shows a list of items on the iPod, in grey text. Both iTunes and iPod are repoprting 53.3GB free, but the iPod is also showing 0 ssongs, 0 videos and 0 photos.
When I view the iPod in Explorer, the music folders appear. I can even play the files from those folders in iTunes. It might give an error message, but it still works.
I've tried switching the iPod from disk mode, but that doesn't seem to work. In fact, now I am looking at the iPod in iTunes, it does not appear in Windows Explorer, so that seems a safe bet that it is not in disk mode.
I then ejected the iPod from iTunes. When I reconnected the iPod, it appeared as a disk in Explorer. However, iTunes now shows the error "iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod "x". Use the iPod Updater to restore the iPod to factory settings." and it disconnects from Explorer as well.
I closed iTunes, reconnected the iPod and it now appears in Explorer, iTunes opens and gives the chkdsk and the iPod Updater error messages.
What should I try now? (I haven't tried formatting or chkdsk.)
PC   Windows XP Pro   1GB RAM

Answer 1

I spend almost two hours on the phone to AppleCare people this morning. It was a very strange problem indeed and isn't resolved for sure just yet. The iPod was just refusing to get out of Disk Mode, which is quite strange.
Here's some extra steps that might help anyone else.
1. I was able to use the Mac version of the iPod Updater and iTunes worked fine on my old iMac. The iPod snapped out of Disk Mode after the Update and kept working after iTunes. Like normal. So that suggests that that iPod itself was not completely broken.
HINT: Have a Mac lying around when you have trouble with your Windows format iPod.
2. You can format a FAT32 device with OSX Tiger, even over the stupid 32GB limit that Windows XP and 2000 imposes. (FAT32 is good for 4TB, according to the spec.)
Open Disk Utility.
Close iTunes. (You may have to use Activity Monitor to kill the iTunes process.)
Select "55.9GB Apple iPod Media" or similar. Select Erase and choose the Volume Format "MS-DOS File System".
3. To really clean the iPod, format with OSX as above, but choose the Erase Free Space... option to write zeros to the disk. A normal format (twice) didn't really help me, so I'm trying something more drastic that AppleCare suggested.
4. (Untested by me) Or use Windows XP to format the iPod as NTFS. Then use iPod Updater to restore, which will reformat the iPod file system to FAT32, (I've got my doubts about that method. YMMV)
5. Really uninstall Windows iTunes, iPod Updater and QuickTime. After a restart, run Windows Install Clean Up to remove any installer files for those three applications that might be hanging around. See Microsoft knowledge base 290301 for instructions and download of the Clean Up utility. (It didn't find any stary installer files on my PC.)
6. Download and reinstall iTunes with QuickTime and iPod Updater. (I'd already done this once during the week, but I thought I might as well make sure, right?)
Next Steps:
Once I've finished writing the zeros (only 10 hours to go!) I will eject from the iMac and try updating and syncing to iTunes in Windows.
Could I use the iMac as my media centre? Not really. It is old and slow and has a small HDD. I could network the iTunes folder onto my big PC...? The big downer is the lack of FireWire support for these new iPods, so I'm stuck with USB1.1 on the iMac. Too slow.