My iPod stopped working while I was riding my bike. The hard disk froze. I tried restoring it. I tried reformatting it (on my PC, Mac and Linux box).
I bought a replacement hard disk from Geeks.com. That didn’t work either. I sent it back. They sent me another one. That didn’t work. They sent me another one.
That didn’t work. I’m a little off on Geeks.com right now. I tried repartioning it on my Macintrash with pdisk. It looked like this:
Partition map (with 512 byte blocks) on ‘/dev/disk1’
1: Apple_partition_map partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 65536 @ 63 ( 32.0M)
3: Apple_HFS disk 29231920 @ 65599 ( 13.9G)
Device block size=512, Number of Blocks=29297520 (14.0G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0
I kept getting the message no valid block 1, so I gave up.
I didn’t want to spend $150 for a disk (Toshiba doesn’t make the MK1503GAL disk anymore, so most of the available replacement disks seem to be “refurbished” or pulls from “working” iPods).
What pisses me off is I have this good 3G iPod (except for the hard disk) and it costs half the price of a new one to fix it. Or I could send it to Apple; they’ll fix it for $255.55. I guess I’ll make it into an iPod Super, and break down and get a 5G for carrying around.
The 3G iPod was first released in May 2003, so I’m way behind Steve Jobs new ipod every year theory.
Thanks, Ladytech.
Hitting it was the first thing I tried. In fact, I always hit things first (e.g., when there is a dusty motherboard and dropping the case happens to reseat loose connections).
Unfortunately, I could hear the head seeking so I concluded it was a goner. I opened up the drive (see the second picture) and the actuator was moving freely, but since I’d taken the cover off, it was all over anyway.
You may want to try hitting the Ipod against the flat of your hand just after you turn it on. It may take 2 or 3 good whacks, but what happens is the heads stick on the hdd – whacking it breaks it loose. It works best just after you turn it on when the drive is trying to spin up. You can check if this is your problem by putting your ear against the ipod as you turn it on, you will probably hear a funny burring sound that repeats. Give it a try – it isn’t working now anyway!
This has nothing to do with repairing your iPod, but, just yesterday I heard of a guy that was hit by lightening while wearing his iPod. The lightening followed the pathway of the iPod, thus, melting the ear attachments in the guy’s ears, leaving him mostly deaf, and, burning him all along the pathway of the cords resting on his chest and down to the device attached on his belt.
Not a good experience!