iPod Question: Trying to avoid deleting songs.

[BeeBadger]

I have the 40 Gig iPod. Great MP3 player hands down. When I reinstalled windows I had about 700 songs on the iPod. When I reinstalled iTunes and the iPod program, it saw an empty Library and deleted everything on the ipod.

The only way to access the iPod icon is to plug it in, this is where I guess I can program the iPod not to copy everything from iTunes automatically. Luckely I backed-up all the songs on a DVD.

How do I avoid this from happening again? Is there a set-up in the iPod or iTunes program, that stops iPod from trying to mirror whats on iTunes?

I am using WinXP, and my specs are below.

Thanks

[g5orbust]

The iPod, natively, will always update itself based on the contents of the library. If the library is empty, the iPod will deleate its current hold of songs. You can disable this by plugging in the iPod and clicking on the iPod symbol in the bottom right corner of the iTunes window. This will allow you to select what is import and here you can deselect auto update.