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Simple Fix To iPod Madness?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-you-might-call-counterintuitive dept.

doce writes "After chunking my seemingly dead iPod off my balcony while reviewing a rubberized case, the darned thing started working again, though not quite perfectly. After taking it apart, I managed to fix it properly just by reseating the hard drive cable. Could this be the cause of all the click-of-death "sad iPod" failures users are seeing?"

5 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Creative Players by Deliveranc3 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Creative HD based players all have a problem where they move the headphone connector off the motherboard.

    After 6 months the headphones start stuttering and slowly fail. This is due to this problem and can be solved by soldering the wires.

    It happened to at least 7 players that I know of and it's a huge problem.

    Ipod problems seem worse, but not much worse.

    Isn't planned obsolesence fun!

  2. Cables come unplugged by Mistshadow2k4 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I don't have an iPod (just don't really need an mp3 player) but I have an external hard drive that seemed to die on me after my cat knocked it off my desk. It turned out that the cable in the enclosure had simply come unplugged. I now tell folks when they say a drive died to check the cables. So far, that's been the problem 1 out of 4 times with my customers.

    --
    I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
  3. Similar iBook Problem by SinGunner · · Score: 4, Interesting
    My iBook was dying last year (it was only 14 months old), but I hit it once (out of frustration, I'm weak) and the damn thing started working great. About a month later, the same thing started happening, so this time I decided to take it apart to figure out what was wrong (never try this. it's easier to open the damn box from Hellraiser). I found that all the connectors in the entire iBook are inserted parallel to their respective cards/boards. I thought this was genius, as it would keep cords from wiggling loose from picking it up and putting it down as is the constant state of a laptop. I then got to the only cable in the whole damn thing that is placed perpendicular to the motherboard: the hard drive cable. It's basically designed to come out. The cable comes up from underneath and connects to the motherboard. Obviously the engineers saw the intelligence in connecting all the other cables the way they were, so why not this one? Hell, the hard drive cable is secured with plain ol' tape. That's how bad it is. I really couldn't believe it. I figured out the reason for this design flaw when I took it to the Mac store. I explained exactly what was wrong and that I simply wanted them to take the time to take it apart and resecure the cable this time (because I just don't have the time or patience to do it again) and they quoted me 450 dollars to fix it. I tried to explain that nothing was wrong with the damn thing, but their amazing technical genius (they didn't even look at the damn thing other than to plug in a USB cord and say it seemed like they could see the drive, which is plausible) quoted their base price to fix a "broken" iBook.

    Suffice to say, I'm planning on building a Linux box for my next computer. I guess it was a lesson learned. Mr. Jobs had me at "hello", but he lost me at "450 [goddamn] dollars".

  4. Re:First Law Of Electrical Engineering by FidelCatsro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    No that was third, second was, have you had your coffee or caffeine pills.

    --
    The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
  5. Common Fix by PAPPP · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The "Throwing it off the balcony" part is just an extreme version of a common fix for stuck harddrives. Giving a dead drive, especially one that is "ticking", a good firm smack will often get it working again. Works best on small (2.5" or smaller) drives. I've resurrected quite a few drives with the same trick, including the one in my Rio Karma, as someone suggests here at riovolution . The way it works is sometimes the heads and/or platters will get stuck, possibly due to suction between the two, and the smack frees them. It often causes minor physical damage (a couple bad blocks), and a drive resurrected this way's days are probably numbered, but its great for fixing drives long enough to get the data off, or in the case of devices with nothing overwhelmingly important on them (like mp3 players) simply getting a few more weeks/months/years of use out of them.