Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Viegas
Do you know how the desktop died? If the hard drive is still good, then you can likely by an external enclosure with a USB connector and hook it up to your laptop. This is probably a $15.00 solution.
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^^^ What he said.
The next obvious thing to do is fix the computer itself; if the hard drive isn't the problem, then it should be possible to replace just the broken part.
If the hard drive itself truly is dead, then you can retrieve the songs/artwork from the iPod itself with a for-pay tool from
Transfer iPod to iTunes, copy iPod to PC and iPod to computer, which understands the database format and unmangles the names. Same folks have a free player that lets you play the tunes on the iPod directly through the computer. Works very well (you can even run it from the iPod drive partition, so don't need to install it).
Personally, I've never trusted iTunes one inch. Suckiest part of the iPod experience by far, and an increasingly bloated piece of junk. Refuse to get locked into it..
I rip all my CD's to high bitrate MP3's on an external drive which I back up from time-to-time with another external drive that lives in a drawer... I just import the folder in iTunes to load it on the iPod, if I don't use GtkPod and Rythmbox to manage the iPod without using iTunes (or the associated bloatware) at all.