Sunday, November 05, 2006

iPod 100% CPU utilization - problem solved

I finally gave in an got an iPod. I was a relatively early adopter of digital music playback, as I've had an Iriver IHP-120 (also known as the H120) for a couple of years. It died on a flight back from Boston a couple of weeks ago, and I had a whole day before my next flight, so I bit the bullet and picked up an iPod.

Things went okay for the first week or so, but then I started to have a problem where I could not eject it -- iTunes would lock up hard when I tried to eject the iPod. Then I developed a new problem, where connecting the iPod would cause ipodservice.exe to activate, and my machine would go to 100% CPU and stay there.

I tried a lot of things to fix the problem, none of which worked (until the last one, of course). Over the space of two days...

- I uninstalled iTunes and reinstalled it, which did nothing
- I uninstalled iTunes and Quicktime, and then could not reinstall Quicktime until I (finally) found the quicktime files in /WINDOWS/System32/
- I deleted dozens of quicktime and itunes references from my registry
- I uninstalled and reinstalled again

And of course, I rebooted dozens of times.

The problem, as it turned out, is all about drive letters. It seems that iPods do not like to share their drive letter with other devices, even if said devices are not connected.

If you're having this problem, try what worked for me:

With the iPod connected (and CPU at 100%, of course)

Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management

Select the iPod and choose a different letter. I picked "I" since it's high enough I should not get another drive up there. You'll get a warning that changing drive letters may make software not work. This is only true if you are running applications from your iPod, so I felt safe ignoring it.

This fixed the problem immediately.

31 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes! YES! Thanks you so much for this, I can't believe how crappy Apple made this... Ofcourse it's Microsoft's fault etc etc... But I guess they both are pretty crappy :')

THANKS

Anonymous said...

Finally! What an easy solution to a problem I've been trying to solve for months ... thanks!

Kevin said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Anonymous said...

Wow!!! I have messed with this problem for the past 2 days and invested at least 6 hours into this problem, all the way being steered into the weirdest corners of my computer that I never cared to explore. And really it was fixed in 2 minutes after reading this. My deepest gratitude, now I can finally sleep. Tim

jrloki said...

bruahahah

i love you for this blogentry! you saved my weekend!!!!

thank you very much

Anonymous said...

Thank you thank you. How on earth did you ever figure this out. i could not find anything on-line
Dave

Anonymous said...

You are brilliant. I'm usually good at solving problems like this and I screwed around with this thing for a month. A simple and elegant solution

Ginger Campbell, MD said...

I am having a similar problem and I am on a MacBook and I have had my iPod for years.

Obviously, your solution won't help me, but I am wondering if Apple hasn't somehow messed up the latest version of iTunes.

peachus said...

Thank you! I've had this problem on and off with two iPods over the years.

You solved everything instantly.

Anonymous said...

YEAH! Man you're a genius. I've been trying to fix this for months now... I knew it wasn't my iPod ;)

Many thanks!
Erik

Unknown said...

OMG -- You kick ass...
I was -->this<-- close to calling Apple support.

Now to figure out what device is hogging the drive letter...

Does anyone know how to force the iPod to always come up with your custom drive letter each time you plug it in?

Anonymous said...

How nice! You are an angel. I nearly throw my ipod mini to the rubbish bin! It drives me crazy. I kept on installing, uninstalling different versions. Reformat the ipod....and finally decided to declare a total lost on this ipod.

Thank you again.

Anonymous said...

Thanks =) had the same problem and your solution worked just fine !

Anonymous said...

You have made my week! I have tried all solutions provided by Apple and some more.... I can't believe that Apple hasn't identified this issue.
Thanx a lot!

Rick said...

Thank You for this post!! This should be in Apple's FAQ or smth. My iPod letter was C so i guess it got iPodService consused :)

Anonymous said...

I've been having the same problem that you had, and have never looked forward to plugging my Shuffle into my PC.

Thank you for providing a solution that fixed the problem!!!

Anonymous said...

Thanks my friend.
Had exactly the same problem for ages and your solution solved it.
I see that Apple still don't even have this an issue on their support site !!! ..cazy.

Thanks again.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the post! I installed a new HD/OS on my brother-in-laws computer, and due to some complications during the install, the drive lettering was off and his iPod would come up as the C drive. I tried everything, but only fixed it after I read this. Thanks again!

Nitin Verma said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Jason said...

!!You Champion. Thanks heaps!!!

Anonymous said...

better support then Apples website.

Tall Mohammad said...

WOW !
that was easy !!!!
Poor coding by apple as this did not use to be a problem. Or MS again changed something. I curse them both. May their email inboxes be always full of SPAM and Nigerian Scams!

Thank You very much for your help

AmyMargaret said...

Yes, you are a brainiac

Anonymous said...

whoop-whoop! several hours invested in this problem and now itunes and my pod are talking again

braniac indeed!

Anonymous said...

Awesome... I could not change the drive letter with xp running, it totally locked up when I connected the ipod, so I changed the dvd drive letters, and unpluged the back up hard drive, and viola!!! Rebooted and the ipod worked, It wanted the "D" drive letter, which was the back up HD. Then I just changed the ipod letter to "k" and reset all the other drives and no problems since... Thanks

Anonymous said...

You are not just a brainiac, you are God.

Anonymous said...

I was so skeptical about getting a new generation ipod because my old one was so good to me, but I knew one day it would break so I got another one to save myself the heart break. Of course, the moment I brought it home, it didn't work with my itunes. It just froze and wouldn't let me transfer my music onto it. I've been struggling for weeks trying to figure this out!I love love love love love love love you times a million for this tip! It worked perfectly!!! :]

Anonymous said...

thank you so so much. After so much stressing out about my relatively new iPod not working, this solved my problem instantly.

you're officially my hero! :)

Dave said...

This did not work for me, I followed the instructions and I now have my ipod on the I: also,

14th-Dec-2011
160gb Classic Ipod software v2.0.4
Latest Itunes v10.5.2.11
64-bit laptop and itunes

I've tried reinstalling, restarting, unplugging-replugging, resetting, deleted every itunes/quicktime folder known to man and my ipod was wiped during the 1st crash :P

This is the only page i've seen any help for the apple sites is full of problems no solutions, yet this help didn't fix it,

if anyone can help me further contact me on my student email:
s11002557@mail.glyndwr.ac.uk

-Dave

Dave said...

This did not work for me, I followed the instructions and I now have my ipod on the I: also,

14th-Dec-2011
160gb Classic Ipod software v2.0.4
Latest Itunes v10.5.2.11
64-bit laptop and itunes

I've tried reinstalling, restarting, unplugging-replugging, resetting, deleted every itunes/quicktime folder known to man and my ipod was wiped during the 1st crash :P

This is the only page i've seen any help for the apple sites is full of problems no solutions, yet this help didn't fix it,

if anyone can help me further contact me on my student email:
s11002557@mail.glyndwr.ac.uk

-Dave

Kevin said...

Sorry, Dave - I have not had a recurrence of this issue on any of my current iOS device (iPhone 3G/3GS/4, iPad), so I'm not sure where to turn. :(