Since buying an 5th Gen 80Gb ipod I have had to deal with the dreaded restore loop, and thought I’d show how I finally fixed it in case it helps anyone else.

I am using a Macbook running OS X 10.5.2, and iTunes 7.6.2, though one of the screen shots is from a PC.

The restore loop begins when the ipod comes up with the screen on the left, asking you to connect to itunes and restore your ipod.

When you connect, itunes shows the screen below. Clicking the restore button will wipe the ipod and return it to factory settings. If it is the first time you have done a restore it will take a little while for itunes to download the ipod firmware file, subsequent restores will be much quicker.

So far this is exactly how things are meant to work. The problems begin when the ipod restarts.

It should then reconnect to itunes and appear ready to be named and filled with music.

Instead the restore screen reappears and itunes says “iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode - Use iTunes to restore”. Repeated restores follow the same cycle.

Looking on the web there appear to be a few different solutions that people have found. Firstly for PC users, renaming drive letters can sometimes solve the issue. More info on this can be found here.

The next solution that works for some people is to put the ipod into disk mode and then connect it to itunes. Before placing the iPod into disk mode, you should verify that it is charged.

First toggle the Hold switch on and off.

Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons for at least 6 seconds until the Apple logo appears.

When the Apple logo appears, release the Menu and Select buttons and immediately press and hold the Select and the Play/Pause buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears, (as shown to the right, it will say Disk Mode at the top of the screen).

Connect the iPod to your computer; the screen on the iPod will change and say “Do not disconnect”, and the ipod should appear in itunes and in Finder. Detailed instructions can be found here.

This worked for me to begin with. When connected my ipod appeared in itunes as a new ipod, I named it and could copy music to it. Unfortunately when I ejected the ipod I got this screen to the left as expected, but it stayed jammed on that screen and would not let me access the music.

I had to reset the ipod to get off that screen.

Resets are done by turning the Hold switch on and off, and then pressing and holding the Menu and Center (Select) buttons simultaneously until the Apple logo appears (about 6 to 8 seconds).

My ipod then reverted to the “Connect to your computer, use itunes to restore” screen, and I appeared to be back to square one.

After more searching online I decided to try using an older version of itunes as some people mentioned issues starting with itunes 7.

I downloaded itunes 6.0.5 from oldapps.com, and replaced my existing itunes installation with it. I had to re-import all of my music into this older itunes as it would not recognise the itunes 7.6.2 library.

Once this was done I put my ipod which was still displaying the “Connect to your computer, use itunes to restore” screen into disk mode and connected it.

It displayed the “Do not disconnect” screen and then itunes showed a message saying something along the lines of “This ipod requires a newer version of itunes”, and the ipod did not appear in the itunes sidebar. I quit itunes and saw that the ipod was appearing in Finder (as it should in disk mode), so I ejected it and lo and behold it ejected properly, and the music I had put on it back when it had been connected to itunes 7.6.2 was there!

I re-installed the latest version of itunes and the ipod connected straight away and ejects as it should. I have been a little wary of exploring more so far, but I will see how it goes and update this page if it stops working or I fiddle any more.

I assume that the software clitch that was kicking the ipod back into restore mode was somehow connected to itunes 7.6.2 but I do not know how, or why, the loop was broken by trying and failing to connect to itunes 6.0.5?

I hope this might help someone out there. Please let me know if you find any other solutions and I’ll add them here as well.

Due to a melt-down by my nokia 5500 I have recently been using a motorola razr as my main mobile phone. Despite it having the worst designed address book I have ever had the misfortune to use, it does sync with my mac quite well so I have made do whilst waiting for the the iphone to finally appear.

One thing that had been getting on my nerves was the lack of predictive text when sending messages. Finally I found this post which tells how to change the text input settings.

Downloading content from a website can be easy or slightly more tricky depending on the browser you are using. Macworld recently posted a how-to article on the finer nuances of using the activity window in Safari, including how to download embedded content easily.

The Activity pane opens by hitting ‘option-cmd-A’ or selecting ‘Activity’ from the Window menu. This then shows the individual components that make up the web page. If there is a certain item you want to download (an embedded movie clip for example) simply Option-double-click on that item and it will start downloading. Of course this should only be used on content that is legally available for downloading, not sites like Youtube that are streaming only. You may need to add a .mpg extension to the downloaded file if it downloads without one.