[steve911]

Basic facts above

I bought a new PC months ago and am finally getting around to getting whatever I need off of it so I can decommission it.

Ran into a problem last week when I fired up the old PC.

Old PC which I had used to sync ipod/itunes has 'issues' (hard drive is showing 'Not Installed' in set up, so old PC won't boot. It is there, but I may have mucked up something when I mistakenly was in the setup menu....

Is there a way to turn off whatever setting is on the ipod that has it linked to the old pc so I can download the ipod onto the new PC? I get an error message when I hook up the ipod to the new PC, saying it is already linked to another PC.

Apple store says I'm out of luck, but I can't believe that there's not some workaround. They say I have to first de-link the ipod and the old pc (which I can't do at the moment due to the aforementioned hard drive not being 'installed'.)

I have both songs that I've purchased off iTunes, plus a bunch of songs that I've ripped (legally) onto the ipod. I don't want to lose what I've got on the ipod and I'd like to add things to it, but can't until I get this issue resolved.

Separately, on the old PC, is there a way to have the hard drive re-installed or somehow recognized to that I can get the system to boot up? It has an A: floppy slot, but of course I don't have a DOS boot disk anywhere that I can find.
The machine was running XP (slowly) before these issues cropped up. It is 5+ years old.

Thanks,
Steve