Question : Problem: IPod causes "Scan and Fix" dialog box under Vista

Using Vista Ultimate, Itunes 7.5 (latest), but when I connect one of my IPods, either Shuffle, 20GB or 80GB Video, I get the following message in a pop-up dialog box:

"Do you want to scan and fix IPOD (I)? - There might be a problem with some files on this device or disk" It then gives me options to Scan and Fix or continue without scanning. This is quite distracting as it happens everytime I connect the IPOD, and also quite often during syncronizing the device. How do I fix this?

Answer : Problem: IPod causes "Scan and Fix" dialog box under Vista

Any USB drive, MP3 Player, or Ipod is catagorized as a mass storage device. Because  Windows (XP too) practices a little nasty trick they call 'precopy' that affects removable devices.

Basically, when you drag items to it (copy) and then it says 'done' or the copy dialog box goes away its not really done! Windows wrote the file header and allocated the space but did not actually copy the entire contents of the file. So when you yank the drive out at that point - bad data.

Because the device was not removed 'correctly' a bit is not written to it and Vista recognizes that and asks to scan it. Essentially it is running CHKDSK /f. Tto prevent this - you need to be sure that windows is 'done' with the drive before disconnecting it. Either by waiting a good bit of time or left click on the usb icon down by the system clock and click remove device if all other applications using that device are closed and no other threads are connected it will say Device successfully disconnected.

Here is a nice 3rd party tool
http://safelyremove.com/