Tale of iPod woe

Well, my iPod did something new today, I think 6 months of verbal abuse and being forced to work with non-Apple sanctioned software has taken its toll on the little bugger and it finally rebelled. The rebellion started with a fairly normal refusing to mount and crashing windows; then we had a game of I'm mounted but ml_ipod doesn't recognise me and neither does iTunes; this escalated into crashing iTunes everytime I plugged it in.

At this point the little shite pulled it's grand finale, deleting all my music from it's library leaving it uncapable of the one thing it has been reasonably good at up in till now - playing music when away from a computer. To make matters worse, it then refused to connect to my PC leaving me with a nice Apple branded paper weight.

After a little struggling, I forced it into running in disk mode, and gave him a thorough formatting and a stern talking to. I've uninstalled ml_ipod (a task in itself, my final solution being manually deleting the dll's from Winamp's plugin directory) and resorted to using only iTunes in the hope that this time some TLC in the software department will keep it running smoothly. I've got no problems to report in the 4 hours since I started this, but it's a tricky little bastard so only time will tell.