My brother just got it 2 days ago, without any sort of input from me (the idiot lol). The first problem was that my system lacked a firewire port, so i had to go & buy a PCI card.
After a smooth install, i tried installing the software in. Unfortunatly, like many others know, it doesnt support 98SE, i was this close to kicking his ass for getting this thing!
After scouring the web for fixes, most suggest 2 software Xplay & Ephpod (more love the latter though), here are links:
<A HREF="http

/www.ephpod.com" target="_new">http

/www.ephpod.com</A>
<A HREF="http

/www.mediafour.com" target="_new">http

/www.mediafour.com</A>
So i ended up trying the latter. Unfortunatly the instructions wernt very clear, apparently 98SE has very poor firewire support, & required this patch from Microsoft:
<A HREF="http

/www.microsoft.com/windows98/downloads/contents/WURecommended/S_WUFeatured/1394/Default.asp" target="_new">1394 update</A> (Shortened link)
I patched it in & still the program wouldnt work. The drive does say "Ok to disconnect", which means it is being recognized by 98SE. What needs to be done was that iPod should be seen as a new drive, which then Ephpod could then use. That didnt happen in my case, so i turned to Xplay.
After installing Xplay, well it didnt work straight away. I had to tweak various settings back & forth, alter the firewire plug between the 2 ports, & hard/soft-booted tonnes of times before something happened. When it finally recognized the drive, Windows installed additional components from the installation disk & voila, a new drive appeared.
Xplay worked like a charm after that. The unfortunate thing is that its only shareware, & so i have to find a way to make this thing work before it stops working. When i get the iPod back from my bro, ill try to reinstall Ephpod & see if it'll work again.
And another thing, another forum said a lot of folks successfully got the iPod software to work by simply replacing some windows files. Im not very sure what they were talking about though, here's the thread:
<A HREF="http

/www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_20417943.html" target="_new">http

/www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Q_20417943.html</A>
<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Woodman on 02/13/03 05:53 AM.</EM></FONT></P>