Resurrected an aging iPod 5G.
For Christmas of 2005, Santa came down the chimney and left iPods for the kids. Over time, one of these iPods became neglected, spending much of it’s time in a drawer. I contemplated using it for myself, but the thought of loading iTunes on my Windows laptop kept the iPod living a lonely life.
Since discovering foobar2000 about a year ago, my music collection had become nicely organized, properly tagged and wanted to spread it’s wings. While perusing their support forums, an available component called foo_dop was receiving much acclaim, so I decided to dust off the iPod.
When I plugged in the iPod into my laptop’s USB port, so it could charge up, the adventure began. The iPod would bounce from the please wait, low battery screen to the Apple logo screen. This went on for hours, it was caught in a strange loop and what made matters worse, was the clicking sounds coming from the hard drive.
On to Google, to do some research, and what I found was that I wasn’t alone. The Net is littered with people having the same issue, and nobody had a perfect solution. The funniest posts came from people claiming to fix their iPods by banging them against something, and after a day of wrestling with my iPod, the thought of whacking it came to my mind.
Putting the iPod into disk mode and trying to format it in Windows produced the same results, clicking sounds from the hard drive and the progress bar stuck at 2%. I needed to wipe it clean and the solution came by way of Rockbox, their instructions for an IpodManualRestore on Linux proved to be the process that freed my iPod from click syndrome.
Luckily, the iPod came to life and I was able to transfer over 2 gigs of music to it using foo_dop. This afternoon, I went out to T.J. Maxx and picked up a pair of Skullcandy headphones. The iPod is working fine, knock on wood ;)
Click, click boom
I’m on the radio station touring round the nation
Leaving the scene in devastation