Ipod appears to have been erased after plugging into stereo via USB, but it's still full?

[Frank Patton]

I have an ipod Nano 6th gen. I recently connected it, via USB, to a home stereo system, but it's an older system and it didn't recognize it as an ipod. It did recognize it as a USB device, however, but all it did was cycle through the songs at random, changing songs after only a fraction of a second as if I kept pressing the "next song" button rapidly. It was totally unplayable. So I removed the ipod by turning off the stereo (rather than pull it out while it was being accessed) and the ipod said "ok to unplug".

I was shocked to find that my ipod seemed to have been totally reset. All the menus and colours were back to the factory default, and it said there was no music on it. So I plugged it into itunes and tried to put more music on it, thinking it had been erased, but it said that the ipod was full. Looking in the windows disk view I see that it is indeed full, so apparently whatever the files are that index the music and store the settings were erased, I guess, so it reset to default settings and doesn't see the music on it, when it's actually full.



Is there any way I can rescue my ipod? I really dont want to have to format and totally start over from scratch.

Thanks!

 

[Annie_M]

I’ve never had an iPod Nano, but it occurs to me that you might re-connect it with iTunes and try and restore it that way?

 

[Frank Patton]

I’ve never had an iPod Nano, but it occurs to me that you might re-connect it with iTunes and try and restore it that way?

ITunes has no clue. When I connected it just said "welcome to your new iPod!" like it had never been used before.