iPod hard drive won't fully connect to pc or itunes
My 80 gig Ipod video 5th generation has the following issue.
If I connect it to any PC an icon for the ipod drive will show up under "My Computer". Sometimes it is labeled "USB drive" or maybe not labeled at all. If you try to open it the PC will perpetually hang and nothing happens. Under "Device Manager" the Ipod shows up under "Disk drives" as "Apple Ipod USB Device". Also it will not show up in itunes . The ipod charges and works perfectly otherwise.
There is a lot of music stored on the ipod hard drive and I don't want to factory reset it because I will lose what's on the drive. I do not have an itunes backup of the content.
Now I am going to eliminate a lot of potential problem issues to consider immediately.
I have another 80 gig ipod video that works perfectly. To narrow down possible problems I took the hard drive out of this ipod and put it into the problem ipod, ...both 80 gig Toshiba MK80101GAH drives. So the logic board, hard drive connector ribbon cable and USB cable, etc... from the problem ipod is used with the hard drive from the known working ipod. Now when I plug the ipod into my PC using this drive everything works fine. The hard drive can be accessed under "My Computer" and under itunes. The only thing that is different is that I switched the hard drives. The rest of the hardware is the same. The hard drive that won't open on the PC has all my music on it and works fine in the ipod otherwise. I just can't get the PC to open it and can't back it up. I've tried to use a zif USB connector to open the drive but that won't work either.
The drive works perfectly in the ipod I just can't access it to back it up and there is nothing wrong with the hardware otherwise. .....Please help!