You can do that by going to Download iTunes. So, your first step should be to ensure that you have the very latest version of iTunes on your Windows PC. It sounds like you have some of the hassle already taken care of: you plug in your iPod to your Windows machine and the PC sees it and iTunes sees it too. Simple enough, if a bit obscure.Īs it sounds like you’ve already ascertained, you’ll need to restore your iPod to factory defaults (which has the nasty side-effect of wiping everything on the unit too, so I hope you don’t have any music or videos you wanted to backup). If it’s Windows-ready, then after the serial number will be “Format: Windows”. If it’s formatted for Mac OS X, then the last item will be the serial number of the iPod. However, you can restore the iPod disk to use it with a Windows-compatible computer.”īefore we look into their suggestion for this, I’ll note that the way you see if an iPod is Mac or Windows-ready is to go to Settings –> About and scroll to the bottom of the screen. “You cannot use an iPod whose disk is configured for Macintosh on a Windows-compatible computer. Sure enough, in an article entitled How to determine your iPod’s disk format, they say: This is certainly an interesting question and I will optimistically hope that Apple has a tech note on this subject on their support site.
