EggXpert

I found a ipod video 30 gig on the road i was going to salvage the hard drive and use it as an external.  Do i need to use itunes or can i just plug and play???

It's probably formatted as an Ipod. If it does show up as a volume under My Computer you can just format it and go. If it's still formatted as an Ipod, use itunes to format it as a storage device.

how do i do that, im not familiar with itunes. and how will i know if the hard drive is just bad from being knocked around too much???  and which itunes should I d/l. also im not plugging it in like it was before. I have it in an external enclosure. the computer recognized it and it said it was ready for my device to work. but it does not show up on my computer.

 

In this case you'll need to format the drive using the Microsoft Management Console. I'm assuming you're running windows xp

From the start menu, click Run, type mmc and hit enter. When the console loads, use Control+M to open the snapin dialog, hit add, find Disk Management, choose it and hit ok in both windows. Double click on the snapin to run it. The device should show up here if windows is reading it, right click it and choose format (it may say initialize). Choose either NTFS or FAT32. Then it should work fine. 

I did what you said and all that shows up is my hard drive and  my cdroms.  my enclosure is hot on the outside so i know the hard drive is running. is there any other way or is it just not going to work. and is there a place to find a blank 1.8 hard hard drive that i can put in here if i can't get this to work

do you mean you can't find it popping up just like" removable disk" ? but it actually running in the background?

sometimes it will not pop up but you can find it in"my computer"

but if you can't find it in the computer, that is weired.

maybe auto run  function  has been  prohibited  by windows. or you should install the driver of  the ipod, the system can't recognize it.

i installed itunes and the latest itunes and i checked for upgrades I can't think of. it is like the computer knows it is there but nothing pops up.  i don't know what to do with itunes.  i tried the disk managment thing. i mean the drive comes on there is freaken heat.  i might try a little longer.  Where could i buy a 1.8in hard drive to put in my enclosure.