tl;dr — My iPod hangs on the boot screen (black background, silver apple logo). When I try to restore it (on both my Virtual Windows XP and on a Mac laptop), it'll restore fine, but when it reboots the iPod, the iPod'll hang on the apple logo screen, just like before.
Update: I've booted a Windows XP virtualbox, and have the latest iTunes running on it. Whenever I tell iTunes to restore it (while my iPod is in disk mode, since that's the only way it is recognized), it'll download the software, restore my iPod, then say that the iPod is rebooting and that I need to make sure it stays connected.
However, once it boots, it still hangs on the apple logo, and isn't recognized by the computer (host or guest). If I boot it into disk mode, it is recognized, and iTunes shows the "Welcome to your new iPod" screen; the iPod is wiped, and presumably installed the new software.
I've searched and searched for an answer, and although I've found numerous posts on other sites similar to my problem, most of them haven't worked for me.
Basically, what's happened is about half a year ago, my iPod would occasionally freeze, and I could solve the issue by restarting it (Menu+Select); about late November last year, however, my iPod froze on the boot screen (black screen with apple logo), and since then I haven't been able to do anything – it just hangs on that screen until it completely drains the battery. My problem is similar to the one in this video.
Is there a way I can fix my iPod Nano 4th Gen?
Also, I'd prefer if I could do it without iTunes, since I'm running Ubuntu and Wine has spotty iTunes support, but I can run a VirtualBox of Windows if need be.
Best Answer
For restoring, iTunes is the best option. Once you’ve determined if iTunes can restore the device - if not, you should have a specific error code from iTunes that explains precisely what’s not working (or have an error code to report here).
If iTunes can’t restore the device, a hardware repair may be in order as well.