iPod Recovery
Two weeks ago at a picnic I made the mistake of pulling the USB port and disconnecting my iPod from my laptop rather than selecting "eject." This apparently corrupted the iPod so that it was no longer being mounted as a drive. The iPod still dropped into it's "Do not disconnect" mode and the syslog showed that Ubuntu was still recognizing that an iPod was being plugged in, it just would not put an icon on the desktop or create the directory structure in the .media folder.

When I plugged it into a Windows machine, it was recognized as removable media and was accessible.

At work, Art suggested an application called YamiPod which, in addition to being an iPod music manager program, also has a repair feature. I download, installed and ran the repair. It took half an hour to crunch through my 30gig iPod but, when it was all done, Ubuntu mounted it again.

Using gtkpod, it no longer showed up with the name I had given it but with a simple drive designation E:. My playlists were gone (but YamiPod had warned about that happening when the repair ran.) Also, the extended information file threw a checksum error. A handful of tracks were corrupted from Enya, Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, Magna Canta, the Danger Man, The Sea Hawk, Halo and Last Exile soundtracks. Mostly, they just lost their title or album name information. I just needed to re-load those. Eventually, it was back to normal.