My iPod Is Suddenly Saying It Is Full

July 22, 2008 12:18 PM

My 80gig iPod suddenly tells me that it has only 50.8 MB free, when I have nowhere near that much on the device. Itunes shows the numbers correctly, but the device reports otherwise. Is it OK?

Hi, I have an 80 gig iPod. I'm running version 1.1.2 for the on-board software and 7.7.043 for iTunes.

iTunes says I have 16.53 gigs used for music, 148.8 MB used for a video, 119.1 MB other, with 57.52 GB free.

This morning, the player started shwoing that I have 74.2 GB used with 50.8 MB free. iTunes has the correct numbers. The totals for music and video are the same on the device, but the "other" total is way off the charts and eats up the additional space.

I'm running Vista on a PC.

Which is right, the device or iTunes? How do I fix this if all of that space is being taken up by mystery stuff? I'd like to be able to fill this thing someday.

thanks!

posted by Ironmouth to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

I'd suspect that iTunes is more right than the device. If you have it enabled in disk mode, you may have dragged a few big files on there, or it may have written the data a few times over.

Have you tried restoring the 'pod to its factory settings?
posted by sjuhawk31 at 12:22 PM on July 22, 2008

I've noticed that if I make changes to a song in iTunes - altering the name, fixing information about the album and artist, adding album art - it'll then make an 'invisible' copy of the iPod of the non-changed one, and you just see the changed one. If you've done that to a number of tracks, you may have that.

The only way I've found to fix that is a factory setting restore and reload.
posted by mephron at 12:29 PM on July 22, 2008

Response by poster: I've tried resetting it, but not restoring the factory settings. I want to do that last.
posted by Ironmouth at 12:42 PM on July 22, 2008

Response by poster: Restore failed to work. ruh-roh. any help here would be greatly appreciated.
posted by Ironmouth at 12:53 PM on July 22, 2008

Have you tried calling Apple or taking the iPod to an Apple store? Even if the iPod is no longer under warranty, customer service is still usually pretty helpful.
posted by Nelsormensch at 1:18 PM on July 22, 2008

I had that same problem, and it was because I was using both iTunes and a 3rd party software (Floola) to manage my tracks which really messed with my iPod. Unfortunately, the only way to fix it was with a factory restore.

Is your iPod software up to date? I was having problems restoring mine recently and it was fixed when I downloaded the latest update and attempted restoring again.
posted by madforplaid at 2:20 PM on July 22, 2008

I'm not sure that restoring to factory settings includes a drive reformat. You might try using Windows' disk utility formatter app (don't know the name, I'm a mac person) to wipe the drive and reformat it. iTunes should recognize the empty drive and install all the bits it needs to come back to life and be an iPod again. We did this to a friend's iPod Shuffle last weekend to convert it from PC to Mac and it worked fine.
posted by heresiarch at 4:20 PM on July 22, 2008

Your iPod's filesystem may be corrupted. Try what hereisarch suggested or run a disk check utility on the iPod drive (chkdsk on windows, fsck on mac/linux).
posted by azazello at 6:39 PM on July 23, 2008