iPod Problem restoring songs from Ipod

Dear all,

I am writing this for a friend. He has a windows PC on which he had purchased Windows Onecare. (most horrible app ever created).

He was religiously backing up his pc via Onecare, when one day the hard drive failed.

no problem he thought. I'll just restore. Big problem, onecare would not restore once he rebuilt the machine.

His songs are still safe his ipod. However, when he went to restore the songs to newly installed itunes, it would only restore those which he purchased at the Apple itunes store.

He could not get it to transfer any of the non-drm songs. (the irony here is that he actually owns this music. He spend DAYS ripping his cd collection. )

My thought is that I could install ephpod (sp?) and just copy the files off the ipod, then bring them into the correct itunes folder then direct itunes to recognize the songs. (I cant remember the correct terminology, I'm at office on an office machine) But hopefully you get my point.

so anyway, that is my workaround.

My questions are these:
1) why can't he use native itunes synch? Is there a setting that can be changed? Is this a bug or an intentional "feature" to prevent the use of non-drm songs?

2) if there is not way to do this via itunes, does my workaround seem to make sense?

Don

p.s. I just purchased a Macbook for my mom. Her first computer. Holy crap. I'm buying a mac as soon as the wife will let me. It just works. . . period. Combine that with firefox/openoffice/google documents, and I'm FREE of MS hell. Mom creates all her docs in google docs. openoffice is there for opening email attachments. It is FANTASTIC. I am out of the family IT support business. Woo hoo!!

p.p.s. Is there any mac equivalent to Alt-Tab on a windows pc? ****update*** shame on me for not searching first. That has to be the most commonly asked question on this site.

So let me get this right. And this is totally ridiculous if this is true.

I have 40 gb of music on my ipod. All of it ripped from the hundreds of CDs that I own and have a right to rip. But that does me no good.

I am an IT professional and am very aware of how important backups are. however, I've rairly back up the "my music" folder on my PC because I always just assumed it was "backed up" on my ipod.

OK, how about another thought. What is necessary for an ipod to just look like a USB hard drive. If thats the case, cant you use windows explorer to drag and drop the entire directory structure off the ipod into the itunes music folder?

All this only reinforces my belief that any savy home pc/mac user should not store ANY data on their machine itself. It should all be on some type of NAS. Easier to restroe the operating system if anything happens, and also easier to back up.

Thank you all again for your assistance.

Don