My iPod crapped out – along with it 5 years of music including most original songs that I’ve written (for which this ipod had become the only source).  My Ipod was not recognised by my laptop and all my music was gone when browsing the Ipod directly. I was not happy at all! If  Anyways here is quick way to recover your music from iPod.

• • Step one: try rebooting. Press center button and menu at the same time. Usually doesn’t help, but can be therapeutic.

• • Step two: turn your ipod into a usb/flash drive:
    1. 1. reboot (press center + menu at the same time)

     

    1. 1. immediately afterwards press center + play. This will put your ipod into disk mode. Plug into your PC

     

    1. 1. You can now browse your file system. To find your tunes go the the iPod_Control folder (it is hidden, do make sure you display hidden folders) and go to music. Apply liberal cd or dvd backups.

     

• • Step three: fix your problem. when in disk mode browse the iPod_Control folder. order files by date. My two most recent files where: iTunesDB.old, and iTunesDB. My iTunesDB file was 1KB large. My iPodDB.old was 3 megabytes. I simply restored the old database: I renamed iTunesDB to iTunesDB.fkd and renamed iPodDB.old to iTunesDB. Like magic, got my iPod to work.

online resources:
https://web.archive.org/web/20080224073015/http://forums.ipodhacks.com/archive/index.php/t-5749.htmlhttp://forums.ipodhacks.com/archive/index.php/t-5749.html
http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?threadid=239074