Over the last two hours I’ve been trying to get my 5th Gen iPod Nano to sync with Apple iTunes on my 2009 model MacBook Pro, but all I got was the dreaded error message ‘iTunes cannot read the contents of the iPod’. iTunes tells me to restore, but as the iPod won’t appears under the Devices section, I can’t actually perform a restore.
Googling for this error message turned up numerous sites with different methods to fix this issue – they ranged from doing hard resets to hooking your iPod Nano to a Windows box (but requires your iPod to be in hard drive mode). None of these worked for me.
After two hours – I discovered the problem ….. make sure that your iPod isn’t plugged into an unpowered USB hub!
I eventually still had to do a restore since by then, I had well and truly corrupted my iPod drive with all the various previous attempts at fixing the problem. However the ipod was now appearing under devices in iTunes and the restore was quick and painless. Hopefully your problem ends up being as simple to fix as mine …
18/01/2010 at 6:13 am Permalink
Hey, I am dealing with EXACTLY the same problem – same computer and iPod as well. Except for me, a reset is not possible, as my only back up for my music is on a hard drive in New Zealand (and I am in Canada O_o). So a restore is out of the question. Any awesome suggestions?
Also, what do you mean by an unpowered USB hub? You mean, whether your computer is plugged in or not effects the outcome? Because I’ve tried both on battery and plugged in…?
Cheers,
Shannon