When Good iPods go Bad.

My wife's iPod recently started acting up and wouldn't sync at all. And for some time before, it had been refusing to disconnect after a sync. I tried to debug it by installing iTunes on my MCE, which did recognise the iPod, and detected it as being in a semi-reinitialised state, but it failed every time it tried to finish the reinitialisation.

Turned out the problem was that the iPod drive has to be mapped for iTunes to do its magic... well, since the last time it was plugged in, the drive letter that had been assigned to it was now assigned to a network drive. Unfortunately Windows is so stupid that it really wanted that letter for the iPod, and so when iTunes tried to access the iPod as a drive, it was hitting the network share instead.

By going in to the Manage option of My Computer and reassigning the preferred drive letter in the disk management console, the iPod became visible and iTunes was able to properly reinitialise it. At which point when it was put back on my wife's PC, she was able to use it again just fine.

Which was a relief, because it was an 80Gb unit but out of warranty, and if it had been a hard drive error as originally thought, it would have been an expensive replacement.