Problem with my iPod Shuffle.

Recently I had this series of problem with my iPod Shuffle which nearly took three days to solve. The solution which was used to solve the problem didn’t take more than one minute to implement. So here is my experience with my iPod Shuffle which drive me crazy and took nearly 3 days to solve.

Problems

One day while I connected my iPod Shuffle and was transferring music using iTunes I got the following error, when I clicked the Autofill button at the lower right corner of iTunes.  The error is pasted below.

“The iPOd "XYZ" cannot be synced. You do not have enough access privileges for this operation.”

Also windows gave me the following error in a balloon tooltip in the taskbar.

Windos - Delayed Write Failed ”Windows was unable to save all the data for the file G: The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.”

The screenshot of the above error is pasted below.

I was petrified, just now I was transfering music with iTunes, it was working perfectly fine and all of a sudden my laptop is saying I don’t have access privileges. What is happening? Is my laptop gone mad or is it a bug in iTunes? I was just pondering. Then I thought let me disconnect my iPod and see if that solves the problem. Ok, I disconnected my iPod and connected it back. Bang comes the next error message from iTunes. The error message is pasted below.

“iTunes has detected an iPod in recovery mode. You must restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes.”

So next logical thing what I did was I clicked the restore button. Oh no, again one more error popped up. Error is pasted below.

“The iPod “iPod” could not be restored. An unknown error occurred (1429).”

There was an “Ok” and “Help” button on the error message box as shown below.

Clicking the “Help” button took me to the Apple’ support page. The page can be accessed by clicking the link (“http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1372”).

The help page had the usual suggestion like disconnect iPod and reconnect it, if that doesn’t work restart the system, update the windows operating system and blah blah stuffs. The end result was nothing worked. Then as suggested in the help file I downloaded the iPod reset utility from the link  (http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1238).

After downloading and running the iPod reset utility the following  message popped up.

“iPod reset utility cannot continue because there are other applications using iPod. Please close all iPod applications and try again.”

Clicking “Ok” button gave the next below message.

“You iPod needs to be reformatted for use with Windows. Would you like to run iTunes to restore your iPod now?”

Clicking “Ok” opened iTunes and following message error was thrown by iTunes.

“iTunes has detected an iPod that appears to be corrupted. You may need to restore this iPod before it can be used with iTunes. You may also try disconnection and reconnecting the iPod.”

Clicking restore gave the same errors as stated above. Closed my iTunes and then tried executing iPod reset utility but that was also in vain. The error thrown is as follows.

“Formatting failure. Disk write error.”

Screenshot of the above error thrown iPod Reset utility is as follows.

So I decided I will try transferring songs from my office system, just to confirm there is no problem with my iPod before giving it to the iPod service center.  So I took my iPod to my office and connected to my office system. Wow, here it is my shuffle is working fine in my office system. So I concluded that its not my iPod which is having problem, rather its my laptop at home which is having some problem.

Next I started thinking what changes did I do in my laptop that created this problem. Then all of a sudden, as a flash of light, I remembered what I did which could create this problem.

Problem

You won’t believe the solution to my problem was very simple. I have recently installed “Quick heal Total Security 2009” anti virus software and to increase the security of my system I clicked Options and from the pop up’ “Data Protection” section I checked the “Enable Data Protection” check box. The screenshot of the “Data Protection” section is pasted below.

Solution

For all the above problem the solution was to disable the “Data protection” feature of “Quick heal Total Security 2009” anti virus software. To disable the feature click Options from the main screen. The screenshot is pasted below.

From the pop up go to “Data Protection” section and uncheck “Enable Data Protection” check box. The screenshot is pasted below.

If you check the “Enable Data Protection” checkbox the anti virus software will not allow the system to write data on external storage devices like USB drives, Pen Drives, Memory Cards etc. This is to prevent virus from copying themselves to removable storage devices as well as preventing viruses in removable storage device from copying themselves to your system thereby preventing some lethal virus attacks.

Anyways, my advice to people who encounter the above errors should not panic instead check your anti virus software and disable the above mentioned feature. If I am not wrong every anti virus will have a feature to disable external device’ read and write, so find the feature and disable it. That will solve your iPod problem. I had to spend nearly 3 days to find this simple solution, I hope with this blog people will not spend that much time to solve such a small problem.

If you are the above feature just remember you are exposing yourselves to threat. So I would say before connecting your iPod or any external storage device which you trust disable the feature and once they disconnected enable the feature. If you suspect a device its always better to scan them.