Very Low Battery / Resetting issue - lets make Apple fix this!!!

Question

There appears to be a lot of posts within the last few weeks about the "Please wait, very low battery" message and constant resets EVEN ON A FULL BATTERY. I too have begun to experience this problem. I can only think that there is some kind of bug that has been introduced with the latest firmware and itunes combo. Can anyone that it experiencing this issue, PLEASE put your experiences in a reply to this thread. As an addition to my post below, I have also heard that using the prior version to the latest Itunes in conjunction with the latest may also be the root of this problem. I have been using two itunes, the latest at home and a slightly older one at work. Can anyone shed anymore light on this possibility?
This is from a reply post I made earlier tonight:
I noticed my ipod 5th gen 60 gig was strangely in the red on battery life, so I connected it to my macbook pro and answered a few emails. I then noticed out of the corner of my eye that the ipod resetting. Weird! I had never seen it do this while attached to the computer. So, I went back into itunes and it said something about not disconnecting the device physically - some how the pod had reset and disconnected itself. So, I re-attached it, and moments later, it reset again. Instead of attaching to the computer, I attached the pod to a wall powered usb charger (non-official). After a few minutes, the pod said it was fully charged (weird), so I disconnected it. I thought I should check to see if it was playing music ok and started playing a song. It seemed ok, so I skimmed through a few tracks. Soon the ipod reset itself and started to continuously reset as if in a loop. After several reset attempts (menu and select) I was presented with a "Please wait, very low battery" message screen...
Hmmmm. I thought I should attach it to the wall charger and leave it to re-charge, thinking that the battery must be just plain out of juice. I got past the very low battery message and into the menu with a reset. Strangely, the battery showed as being fully charged... Disconnecting the pod and playing several songs again, the unit reset and showed the low battery message... Leaving the pod attached to the wall charger, even though it said it was fully charged, didn't remedy the problem. More resets when playing a song or two.
Initially I thought that it was a faulty battery. But, before I jumped to conclusions, I googled the above message. This showed me that this is a reasonably common issue with several possible causes. Some of the suggestions to remedy the issue included:
* Reset the ipod - nope, same problem
* Restore the ipod - did this first up... No go
* Put the unit into disk mode attach and restore - nope
* Drain the battery completely and then re-charge on wall charger - nope
* Open the unit, disconnect the battery, and re-attach - I really thought this would work, but nope.
* Disconnect unit, insert wall powered usb, start unit to reset it - nope
* Buy a new battery - NOPE, same thing keeps happening even with a FRESH battery!!!
* Put the unit into diagnostic mode and then charge... This kind of worked in the fact that it actually charged the new battery...
It appears to me that the battery status is all out of whack. The OS seems to think that the battery is completely full, and hence, doesn't take a charge. Equally, even though it says there is a full charge, after the unit plays one or two tracks (requiring a few harddrive seeks I suppose) it will exclaim that there is no battery remaining, reset loop and eventually enter "very low battery" mode. It does the latter even if the battery is new and appears to have been charged (via the diag screen).
So, where to from here... Well not entirely sure, but I reckon that what I have to do is drain the fully charged battery WHILE the unit is active. Perhaps then, it will re-calibrate its internal battery meter... Right now, I have been able to put the pod into disk mode and it is actually showing a battery icon WITHOUT the fully charged symbol (the little plug icon). It also shows a slight depletion in battery remaining. My hope is that this depletion will get bigger over the next few days and, if it does, it may right the funny loop-like state it is in.
Has anyone got ANY other ideas as to how to fix this problem. As a side note, I updated the pod to firmware 1.3 recently. I am considering a restore using an older firmware. Where can I track down 1.2? Can I press the option key and click restore to choose an alternative restore image from the 1.3 already in itunes?
Any suggestions/help is EXTREMELY welcome as I am almost about to give up...

Answer 1

I think my problem actually might be the same ... the other day it was full battery one minute, and the next it was saying "Please connect to power,low battery". I wasn't near a power source, so i just left it. Then it started making this funny whirling sound and the screen went silvery blank, so i figured it was the hard drive crashing. I hooked it up to the computer overnight and the next day I could at least get the apple on the screen to show up and the computer would recognize it somewhat. When it's hooked up to the computer it goes from the apple screen, to please wait, very low battery, to the regular screen with a fully charged battery sign, to the "do not disconnect" screen with the battery charging.. When the "do not disconnect" screen appears, sometimes the computer recognizes it. But when it comes up it first says that an unknown error (-124)has occured and the ipod cannot be synced. And then it says the disk cannot be read or written to. After I press okay again, the screen goes to the apple and back to the please wait very low battery screen... and then in tunes it says the ipod cannot be synced because the required folder cannot be found. Then it comes up again and says iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod. Go to the Summary tab in iPod preferences and click Restore to restore this iPod to factory settings. Now I would try to do that, but I don't have a summary tab in the preferences, if the preference tab they refer to is under the edit section. For the couple of seconds the my ipod settings appear on the screen, the files on it aren't even the same as before. It says I only have 7.78GB of only songs on my 30GB. Not only do I have more than 7.78 GB of songs normally on my ipod, I have videos and games that also should appear. Everytime it reconnects however, the GB go down? Now its at 6.07GB
It also makes this beeping sound randomly. Sometimes it when the ipod goes into the very low battery screen, but sometimes it beeps during the apple screen, or sometimes during the do not disconnect screen.
The most frustuating thing for me is that about mid-March I sent my iPod away to get a new battery before my warrantee was up. I got it back the first week of April, good turn around period, but instead of getting my old ipod back, I got a refurbished one. Now this is happening to it, and my warantee is already up. I know it can't be the battery that's wrong with it, there may be something wrong with it, but I'm sure they know better than to give me an ipod with a dead ipod.
Now it's coming up as 5.77 GB . . .
When it first happened, I was hoping that I could simply hook it up to the computer and click the restore button. This is impossible however because I can never get to the restore button before the computer unrecognizes my ipod.