yep... you can do that
hi Andrew. no need to apologize for using a PC. Windows may have problems, but Mac OS X has problems of its own... and so does a lot of recent Apple hardware.
sorry to hear about your dead hard drive too - same thing happened to me in my 2-month-old G4 PowerBook... it''s currently on its way to Texas, where they will hopefully fix the latch, the loose trim, and get the battery to fit all the way inside the machine.
anyway, you should be able to copy all the songs from your iPod back to your PC using any of the following methods:
1) download EphPod (
www.ephpod.com) and install it. launch EphPod with your iPod attached. EphPod will load your iTunesDB file from your iPod and display a list of all the music currently on your iPod. select all the songs in the lower pane by clicking any given song and pressing CTRL+A. now, right-click on the songs and choose "Copy Songs to Directory" from the context menu. a dialog box will open asking you which folder you want to copy the songs to. in my case, there were a ton of songs and it took a very long time. my iPod also got very hot. so i stopped the transfer and opted to transfer the songs in groups. it's up to you, if you don't have too many songs (i have 4000+) it shouldn't be a problem.
2) launch Windows Explorer and look for the Removable Disk which corresponds to your iPod. it will be E: or F: or whatever depending on how many optical/IDE/other drives you have attached. on the iPod, look for a folder called /iPod_Control/ - this is where all your music is hidden. (make sure you have your Windows Explorer set to show hidden files and folders - otherwish the /iPod_Control/ folder will be invisible. inside iPod_Control, navigate to /Music/ and take note of the folders F000 - F20. all your songs are in here. copy them to your computer. you might want to split up the copy, say copying F00 - F05, and later copying F06 - F10, in case your iPod gets too hot.
now, when all the copying is done, launch iTunes and go to File > Add Folder to Library. choose the folder where you put all your songs. iTunes will re-import your songs and sort your library in a more human-readable way (i.e. by artist/album/etc instead of F16, F07, etc). when this is done, you should be able to delete the folder that you used to copy all the songs to... depending on your iTunes settings. make sure that "Copy files to iTunes Music Library when adding to library" is checked (Edit > Preferences > Advanced tab).
either of these methods should work fine for you. if not, post back and let me know what sort of problems you're having.
and by the way, you wouldn't be able to do this on a Mac (AFAIK) without purchasing a shareware utility - Mac OS X purposefully hides the /iPod_Control/ folder so that you can't copy your whole library to someone else's computer, which makes sense, but you can't copy the songs back to your own computer either. maybe there's a way to do it with Terminal, but iTunes will definitely not let you do it... that's what all this library/linking stuff is, Digital Rights Management to appease the RIAA.
