"cloning an iPod without software"

I got this from elsewhere.

_______________

I discovered by accident an easy and stupid way to not only clone an
entire iPod but also to recover the songs from it to your library in
case you HD goes missing in action or even if you get a new computer.

There are software out there costing $20 that do it for you, but I
discovered it is not needed if you do it like follows.

Here's the simple steps to it:

- Close iTunes
- And mount your iPod on Windows (works on Linux too) as if it was a
storage USB drive.
- Use windows Explorer and make sure you are displaying hidden files.
- Go to iPodControl directoy and copy the music folder to your HD. iPod
has a funky way to organize the songs into weird folder and weird names.
Don't worry we will fix it.
- Now go to you iTunes and set Automatically Organize songs on its
settings page.
- Click on Add/Import folder and point it to where you copied the songs
in your hard drive. This will copy the whole thing to your library
keeping the song titles, album information etc.

Ah, yes. In case you have 2 iPods with 2 different names, just create
another user account on your Windows machine so that you can have
different iTunes settings on the same computer.

There you go, all copied!!!

This is a nice way to backup your own music library to more than one
computer as well as copying to a second iPod in case you decide to get
one with bigger capacity.

If you happen to buy music online, it is a good way to back it up too in
case your iPod HD goes bad.

Also, if you want to update your iPod OS make sure you do this first
because you can risk loosing its content by updating its software.