Situation: 15gb 3rd Generation or dock connector ipod came with firewire cable but will no longer mount with the cable. It only charges when plugged into firewire. I can get it to mount with USB, but it doesn't charge while using this cable. Sooooo I get to play the fun switch cables game, when ever I want to do anything with my ipod. I have tried many different cables and many different computers and lots of different ports. I've also followed all the instructions on Apple's site for the 5 R's (reset, restart, reinstall, restore, etc.), disk mode and other things. Nothing helped.

I've done a lot of research online and it seems many people have been having this problem for awhile but there isn't a solution. It seems to have come about when Apple updated its system to like 10.2.3 or 10.3. At about that same time, Apple was also moving their ipods away from firewire and in the process, it is believed, they broke the firewire connection.

This situation of needing two cables is mainly an annoyance until you have to restore your ipod. If you have an older ipod like I do, the restore process outline on Apple's site will run you into a dead end. You'll come to a point pretty quickly where it will say you can only restore the ipod with firewire (if thats what it came with).

We'll I got to this point and didn't find an answer online. I just happened to have all the old updates for my ipod and tried one. IT WORKED! Sooooo if you are having this cable problem, go ahead and hook up with the USB and find yourself an older version of the ipod software...like version 2.2 (2.3 is the newest currently). It won't care what cable you have, go ahead and restore. Then just update your ipod with the other updaters to get it up to the latest version again.

So I hope this helps people who need to restore there older ipods. If anyone has more information or a way to make the ipod work again completely with the firewire cable, please share.

Strange I have a 3g I believe and it doesn't seem to be affected by the problem you describe. Maybe this issue only affects the 15 GB 3g iPods or maybe I missed the problematic update.

Actually I've heard this problem has been affecting people all the way up to those with iPods Photos (or the first color screen ones). I wonder what the difference is?

Update!

It was brought to my attention that the ipod updater 2.2 file is very difficult to find online, so I went ahead and uploaded it for downloading on this site. I figured posting the _link_ in the forum made the most sense, so here you go.

Download _link_: target="_blank">http://www.totallytechworld.com/download/iPod%20Updater%202004-11-15.zip

Remember this only allows you to restore the firewire 3rd gen ipod. It doesn't fix the situation of having to use firewire for charging and usb for syncing. If anyone has any new solutions on this problem, please share.