Avram's journal

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.