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sjohnson4382

macrumors member
Original poster
Dec 23, 2008
38
0
I have an ipod that i have used and kept updated on windows for the past two years. I got all my music moved to my macbook and placed on an external hd to keep from taking up too much room on my macbook. The problem i am running into is that when my ipod is connected, in the screen where you can click to update, it says updates only for mac formatted ipods. How do I go about formatting it for mac, and making sure i don't wipe out all my itunes music?
 
You have to restore the iPod before you can apply any software updates from your Mac, meaning it WILL clear off whatever is on the iPod already. There is no workaround to this.
 
I have an ipod that i have used and kept updated on windows for the past two years. I got all my music moved to my macbook and placed on an external hd to keep from taking up too much room on my macbook. The problem i am running into is that when my ipod is connected, in the screen where you can click to update, it says updates only for mac formatted ipods. How do I go about formatting it for mac, and making sure i don't wipe out all my itunes music?

If it's formatted for Windows then there, honestly, is no reason to format it for Mac. Windows formatted iPods are, I believe, formatted as FAT32, which is also recognised by Macs, meaning it can still be used as a portable disk drive by a Mac as well as by Windows (and of course, still be used by iTunes). A Mac formatted iPod, however, cannot be used by Windows as a disk drive as it doesn't recognise the file format.
 
I believe you can get higher transfer speeds if you do it via the Mac formatting, but it's not a big deal. I did with my 5th gen when I switched to Mac.
 
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