I have a 1st Generation 5GB Ipod.

The problem is itune will not recognize or transfer music to the ipod device. It doesnt show up on itunes but will appear in windows explorer.

Sure I can transfer 5 GB of data directly into the ipod drive as if it's a portable hard drive but that's not what i want.

on default, when you go to the main menu of the ipod and go into 'about', it will display the Capacity of the hard drive to be 4294967295 GB. That's right GB not bytes. This is what the line looks like 'Ca... 4294967295 GB'. All these digits is too long it covers up the word Capacity.

Everytime the ipod is powered up, a folder icon error appears for a few seconds then goes to the main menu. I suspect i needed to RESTORE the firmware. I've downloaded the latest firmware of 1.3 and updated the ipod, nothing has changed.

I have formated the drive using windows explorer then restore the firmware. Nothing has changed.

I have Uninstalled EVERYTHING, itunes, musicmatch, firewire drivers, ipod manager, everything. Then restarted the computer. then firewire drivers are installed, Then i installed the firmware software to restore ipod to see if that corrected the problem. Result is nothing has changed.

Norton Disk Diagnostics showed the ipod to have no problems and no bad sectors but it didnt allow me to do a partition check to see if it's corrupted.

I am tempted to delete the 39MB Unallocated partition on the drive and format the drive but that might make things worse. I need an expert's opinion before i do anything further now. I have tried everything to the best of my knowlege to try to fix this. I would greatly appreciate any suggestions.

let me type more information.

Under the capacity information, it shows Format Unknown. i dont think it's normal to see that.

When i restarted the ipod by pressing Menu and Play at the same time then when i see the apple icon, i pressed the Action Forward and Reverse button at the same time to enter the diagnostic mode.

I have performed the HDD SCAN test. The result is in 20 secs it would say HDD Failed. Strange that i can transfer 5GB of DATA into the ipod as if it's a portable hdd but not use it as an mp3 player.

If i were to delete the Drive's Partition and rebuild it and rescan it using partition magic. It might find any problems there may be but one concern i have is, will that change the hard drive in a way that the ipod will not recognize it any longer and will not do even interact with it as a portable hard drive.

I'm thinking maybe the Master Boot Record got corrupted. That might be what's causing the inaccurate display of capacity and preventing it from displaying any songs or accepting transfer from ipod.

sorry that this is long, just wanted to go through everything so that you know exactly what going on.

This is a complicated problem and i hope someone super smart can give me a solution to this problem. thanks. my email is LiquidtriLLiumD@aol.com if you need to reach me. Thanks.