When you drop something you really shouldn't it sort of falls in slow motion. Sometimes when you drop a glass it doesn't break on impact but on the bounce and for just a brief flash of a moment you think it might not break at all.

I dropped my iPod.

It was a sickening moment. Yes it was on. Yes the drive was spinning. Yes, it was badly damaged.

It would play and then it would stop mid-song and skip to the next one. I threw everything at it. I reset the disc with the iPod updater many times. No help. I opened Apple's disc utility and reformatted the disc. No help. I set the software to write zeroes to the entire disc. No help. I clicked the option to write random data over the disk eight times. No help. I ran both options. No help.

Next I mounted it on the system as a firewire disc. I had a theory that since I was using only a small percentage of the 20 GB drive if I wrote enough data to it, then loaded the music, maybe I could get past the damage. Luckily I had a 300 Mb PhotoShop file handy and started copying it to the iPod. It reached a point somewhere in the fifth copy and the copying stopped due to a read-write error.

Last attempt. I cracked open the case to see if perhaps the fall had loosened the drive's connection to the board. (Did I mention the warranty expired about a year ago?) No luck. Everything was plugged in securely.

This really sucked.

The iPod was a gift and I don't have hundreds of dollars to spend replacing it. I found a company that sold the discs. They wanted $155 for a third generation 20Gb iPod disc installed. $150 if you did it yourself. I could have bought a new iPod mini for $190 and not filled it so that was not an option.

There was only one thing left to do. I went to eBay. I started checking out auctions for used and “new in the box” iPods, but they are selling for not that much less that new ones. (In some cases they sold for more proving that there are completely ignorant idiots bidding for iPods on eBay.) Then I discovered a rather healthy market for iPod parts. Did you know that if you were diligent, patient and a little lucky you could probably build your own iPod from eBay parts for half of Apple's price?

Me I just needed a hard drive. And I got one. Its only 10 Gb so I took a cut in size but I'm not close to filling it so I'm not to upset about that. Besides I've got my iPod back and working, lots of room for more music and my total cost $80.00.

Posted by: Stephen Macklin at 02:58 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment