How I fixed my daughter's iPod (5th generation)

Picture this. I traded my three year old Windows PC in for a shiny new iMac. After transferring the family's entire 300 GB music library from the old PC to the new Mac, it was time to synchronise all four of the iPods of the family, and two iPhones with the new iTunes library. All went well until my daughter plugged in her 5th generation iPod. If this kind of thing interests you, the engraving on the back identifies the model as A1236 but the software on the fron identifies it as MA978. Here's what happend. Plugging it into the iMac caused the usual icon to appear on the desktop labelled Marie's iPod. iTunes was already launched, but even after a few moments more than what I would usually consider reasonable, it still didn't show up under the DEVICES node in the tree. So I quit iTunes and re-launched it. Same result. So I restarted the Mac OS X, with the same result. So I then reset the iPod (holding down MENU and SELECT buttons for more than six seconds until the Apple logo appeared) and hurrah! it showed up in iTunes. But, alas, that was only the first hurdle. After selecting the right playlist and verifying the iPod already had the latest version of its firmware (it had) it was time to click the Sync button. And nothing happened other than the message "Syncing iPod..." appearing in iTunes and the actual iPod reverting to displaying its main menu as if someone had "ejected" it. After a long while an annoying message popped up over iTunes informing me that it was "Looking for iPod...". You know the type of old-school error message dialog box that you can't dismiss or even move out of the way. While this box is being displayed, you can't even do anything else with iTunes. All you can do is wait for the timeout which is only 120 seconds but feels like hours! Anyways, I won't bore you with all the things I tried (things that are suggested by Apple's support no less) but failed, so here's the solution. Find a Windows machine. I know what I am trying to tell you here is probably very easy to do with a Mac and a terminal window, but life's too short to find out how (I did Google it for an hour and gave up). Find a Windows machine and plug in the iPod. Wait for the AutoPlay pop-up that asks you if you want to view the files on drive X (where X is somewhere between D and Z). Make a note of the drive letter and close the pop-up. Open a DOS box or command prompt window. Type in X: (where X is your iPod drive letter noted earlier) and press enter. Now type in ATTRIB -H .* and enter. This will unhide all the sensitive iPod folders on the drive. Now type in exactly this FOR /D %A IN (*.*) DO RD "%A" /S/Q and enter. This will remove all the folders and their contents, and may take a while. This is what the Restore button in iTunes is supposed to do, but doesn't. Click on the tray icon for USB and choose to safely remove the hardware (iPod). Unplug from the Windows machine and re-plug into the iMac and all should be well from here on. It was for me. iTunes detected the new device and asked me to name it, then asked me what music I wanted to put on it, and it worked. The irony of the matter is that I no longer had a Windows machine to do this on, so I had to do it from a Windows XP installation on a virtual machine (using Parallels) on the iMac itself!