Conquering the iPod

[avram]

So I was walking down 9th Street this afternoon, and I pulled my iPod out of my pocket, and it wouldn’t turn on. This is pretty typical behavior now if I’ve left it sitting for more than a day; I have to soft-reset it to get it on. So I soft-booted, and it came up, but none of my music was showing, as if I’d done a hard reset and wiped the drive. I was pretty sure I hadn’t, so I tried soft-resetting it again. This time it came up with the sad iPod icon. Uh oh.

Once I was home, I tried again. Sad icon, and this time I could hear a noise, sort of “Vooo-click-click. Vooo-click-click.” Not a happy sound. Repetitive clicking like that is generally the sound of severe hard drive fuckage.

I looked around a bit on the net. My iPod’s well out of warranty, which means Apple would just charge me $250 and swap me for a new one. For $250 I could just buy a nice new 30GB video iPod, which I have kinda been lusting for, but the rumor mill has it that high-capacity flash iPods will soon be available, and I’d rather wait for one of those if I’m gonna spend money on a new device. (Leaving aside the question of whether I should be spending that much money on a luxury at the moment, which I really shouldn’t.)

So I googled for “ipod ‘hard drive’ failure”, and turned up this article on the Low End Mac site. The guy talks about exactly the problem I was having (sad icon, clicking sounds) with exactly my model of iPod (40GB iPod photo). Turns out it’s a five minute fix, if you can manage to pry the iPod open. It’s a bit of work with a screwdriver, and then you jiggle and re-seat a cable, then snap the iPod back together. Worked like a charm. All my music was even still there. I’m wondering if maybe the needing-a-soft-reset behavior will stop now, too.

Next project: Replacing my laptop’s CD/DVD drive.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

My iPod went through times of needing soft boots from time to time (tempting as it was to give it a hard boot!). I updated the firmware a while back, and it seems like the problem is about 80% gone. You're braver than me, going into the case like that (and I took electronics for several years). We sprung for the extended warranty, and haven't regretted it -- when the old RCA player went spooey the second time, I used the warranty and some money to upgrade to a pod, and when the pod finally went apeshit, I was able to get a replacement right then and there, and the replacement (which had video and more memory) cost the same as the original, so no money was involved.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

ps: Cool how you put the sad icon there, nesting in the text. I had to look at your source to see how you did it, and will try to do something similar when an excuse suggests itself. Did you write HTML to do that, or use a WYSIWYG editor?

[avram]

Wrote the HTML. Or rather, I wrote a Perl script that writes the HTML for me.