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Simple Fix To iPod Madness?
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?"
Maybe.
Hey, you've got something here! Maybe ALL broken Macintoshes can be fixed this way too!!
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
Well, good to see that he tried throwing it off a balcony before he tried taking it apart to see what the problem was...
This guy's the limit!
And that's the maximum this story deserves.
Is it plugged in?????
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!
I've had my (4th gen) iPod reach click-of-death stage twice, and both times I've been able to resurrect it by opening the case, and reseating the drive cable. The second time, it seemed to me that the problem was actually the zif socket at the drive end of the cable, which was displaced on one side by about .5mm.
I think the key to knowing whether this is the problem is to put your iPod into test mode, and look at the smart data. If you see lots of retracts, but no reallocs, then (my hypothesis is that) the hard drive isn't dying, it's just being reset a lot (which involves retracting the heads, and hence the audible click), due to transfer errors as a result of the flaky cable connection.
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.
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".
I've been through two different 3rd generation iPods with dying/dead hard drives. The second, a 40 GB, was acquired, used, to replace the drive in the first (a 30 GB). That means I popped them both opened and did a drive swap, being extra careful to make sure all connections were properly seated.
The first drive was still dead in its "new" enclosure. The second drive still worked -- but only for a few weeks. After that, it exhibited the same symptoms of clicking and slowly dying over time. No amount of reseating helped.
The hypothesis given in the article may very well apply in many cases, but it is not the cause of all the click-of-death "sad iPod" failures users are seeing.
Say hello to zMac.
4 weeks? I took my iPod in and they replaced it on the spot. And it only takes Apple a few days turnaround any time I need a Mac serviced.
While Apple QC has been better in he past, and hopefully will be better again in the future, it still isn't even close to the PC industry average. Their failure rate was the best for desktops, and 3rd from the best for laptops, according to the latest relevant Consumer Reports iirc.
Apple users just perceive their products as premium items, and thus complain louder when they break. And Apple's general newsworthiness magnifies those complaints until random snafus like some people getting stuck in Apple's newest elevator for 45 minutes make it onto Slashdot as articles, and random greedy lawyers start class action suits against Apple without bothering to sign up any actual clients on whose behalf to file those suits.
and drop it.
Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were talking about an Apple III....
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.
click ..... the dAMN THING BROKE AGAIN! ARRRRG!
slap -=SMACK=- tinkle
ahhh, that feels better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"Apple users just perceive their products as premium items, and thus complain louder when they break. "
No, they don't just perceive them that way - Apple sells them that way, and charges accordingly. After I pay $300 for an iPod, I rightfully expect it to last more than a year.
My old Zen Xtra once died due to 'stiction'. This is when the read head gets too close to the platter and sticks to it preventing the HDD from working. The eventual solution was to give it a good hearty whack as it was attempting to spin up, freeing the head and bringing the player back to life.