iPod hard drive won't fully connect to pc or itunes

The cable works perfectly. I used the same USB cable with both setups. The hard drives were the only thing different. All other pieces of hardware are the same even the hard drive ribbon cable. One drive connects to the PC and one does not.

Sounds like a hard drive failure You may not be able to recover that data. You can give some money to a professional and see if them MAY be able to recover it. https://www.datarecoveryguru.com/?gclid=... It has to be a proffesional because I'm pretty sure you do not have a cleanroom lab in your house.

The hard drive hasn't failed. It boots normally on the ipod and the 5000 songs on the drive play fine. Other than not seeing the drive on a PC everything else is normal. If it was a drive failure it probably wouldn't even boot up. The problem I've described is something else.

Okay I'm going to go through a list of things that may solve the problem:

Try a different USB port on the PC

try a different PC

try reinstalling itunes.

try rebooting the PC

try rebooting the ipod

try using ibackupbot to view your files http://www.icopybot.com/itunes-backup-ma...

I've tried all the things on your list except icopybot. My ipod is an ipod video 5th generation and not new enough. It requires an ipod touch with OS 2 or newer. By the way please don't ignore the fact that if I switch the ipod hard drive with another drive everything works fine. By doing that I have eliminated everything on your list as being a possible cause - cable, computer, itunes and anything with the ipod hardware except the drive. I need some out of the box ideas to solve the problem. I would just throw this hard drive away and get another one except it works fine in the ipod and I don't have a backup of the music that's on it. I appreciate your help but all the potential problems you have mentioned so far are eliminated by switching the drives as described in my original post. This drive works fine in my ipod. I need it to mount in the computer.