A minor stupidity on my part and I plugged my iPod into the laptop while I’d mapped a network drive to the lowest available drive letter. The iPod started flashing its “Do not disconnect” message, iTunes started up and all looked normal… after a long time I had a look and saw that iTunes had decided that the iPod’s name was the volume name of the network drive, but still nothing was happening.

Eventually I stopped it and restarted. Next time around iTunes seemed to think that the iPod had been renamed, but then claimed that it was synchronised to a different library, so I had to go through the whole rigmarole of blowing away all 6713 songs and reloading the lot — a ridiculously time consuming task!

Even after it had finished everything is still not right. Somewhere along the way the iPod has lost 23G of storage, only a subset of my library can now be copied! Next step is to restore it via the iPod updater, but that stalls wanting me to plug it into the external power-supply — the USB power isn’t good enough! It shouldn’t be this hard!

Interestingly, there seems to be a new folder called iPod Control created on the fileserver volume that I had mapped to drive F:, and it seems that iTunes was busy filling it up when I interrupted it! Definitely a no-no there Apple!

Stay tuned for tomorrow where I see if I can successfully access all 40G of the iPod and transfer my entire music library into it….

Note to self: DO NOT plug the iPod in when there’s a network drive on the first available drive letter!