It really sucks when all of a sudden your digital music player just goes belly up.
My iPod mini did just that Friday evening. It had a good life from 8th June 2005 until 16th February 2007. Of course, I’m pretty sure that I was the direct cause of its demise.
I had the mini in my back pocket and I sat down. The hold switch was activated so that the key press wouldn’t stop the music. When I removed the mini from my pocket, the forward and play/pause buttons where stuck in the ‘pressed’ position. It seemed that the buttons were caught on the aluminum case. I gently taped the mini on my desk to un-stick the buttons. Worked great; the buttons returned to their normal position.
Shortly after, the mini began to skip through all the songs. No problem I thought, I’ll just reboot it. As soon as I pressed the select and menu button, the mini reset and displayed a ‘sad iPod‘ icon. And I could hear what sounded like hard drive heads clicking. All this time I have always though that my iPod mini was a flash based player. Apparently, it’s has a Microdrive in it.
After disassembling my iPod mini, I removed the Microdrive(R) and replaced it with a 1 GB CF memory card that I was planning on using for another project. The CF card was going to be used for ZeroShell. Oh well.
Once the Microdrive(R) was replaced with the CF memory card I had to put the mini into disk mode to reformat the ‘drive’ using an iPod Updater (it was not the latest and greatest but it worked perfectly). Once the update was complete, I reset the iPod again and started iTunes. When iTunes finally loaded, it asked what I wanted to name the iPod and informed me that my entire music library wasn’t going to fit on the device (which was down to 1GB from 4GB).
Changing the mini from a Microdrive(R) to flash really increased the update speed. After a few minutes, iTunes had loaded as much audio onto the mini as it could fit.
When I was disassembling the mini, I managed to scratch the select button on the touch pad and mauled the aluminum case. Since it still works, I’m not that upset about it.
UPDATE:
30 June 2007 – I’ve updated my iPod with a pqi 8GB CF. iTunes 7 will restore the firmware/format on the new disk which makes the iPod updater obsolete.
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