Q: An iPod Nano was given to me apparently loaded from an Apple computer with a Mac OS software and with songs. I wanted to copy those songs using Music Rescue in my Windows XP-based computer but it does not recognize the iPod and it says that the iPod has to be formatted. What can I do?
– Alejandro
A: Unfortunately, a Mac-formatted iPod cannot be read directly by Windows due to incompatibilities with the file system format.
Essentially, the iPod is presented to the computer as a removable hard disk, and Windows simply cannot natively read Mac-formatted disks.
If you’re not concerned about retrieving any content from the iPod, you can simply perform a “Restore” on it via iTunes, which will reformat it for Windows, but will erase everything on it in the process.
If you do want to recover data from it, you will need to purchase an additional software package to allow you to read Mac-formatted disks from a Windows computer.
MediaFour’s MacDrive ($49.95) is the most commonly-used solution for this.
The other alternative would be to find somebody with a Mac computer and retrieve the information using that machine and then simply burn the information to a CD or DVD.
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