Q: My son gave me his 40 GB iPod from 2004. He has a Mac. There are over 5400 songs on the iPod and I would like to transfer and edit these songs to add to my iTunes library. Windows recognizes the drive but no songs appear on it.
Unless I missed it, I didn’t find an answer to this specific issue on your discussion page. I’ve looked at the third party software you’ve recommended, but I don’t see anything positively stating iPod from Mac OS X to Windows. Any comments would help greatly as I really don’t want to lose all the songs which took a long time to compile.
– William
A: The key to restoring a Mac-formatted iPod onto a Windows computer is to install software that allows you to read Mac-formatted disks under Windows.
The iPod itself is simply an external hard drive as far as your underlying operating system is concerned, and Windows cannot normally read Mac-formatted hard drives.
There is a third-party tool available, MacDrive that can facilitate this for you. This is not an iPod-specific tool, but rather a generic software package for Windows that allows Windows to read any Mac-formatted disk, including an iPod. MacDrive is a commercial software package that sells for $50 USD, but there is a free trial available that should be fully functional for a limited time period.
