Ipod repair thoughts

Original Question
I think you said you have luck fixing ipods. I have a 4th gen (grey scale w/ click wheel) 20gB that gave me the unhappy iPod face about 2 years ago now. I looked it up online and it said "dude, you're screwed." This happened after I left in the car overnight during the winter, so I think it's probably a hard drive issue. At this point, cost wise, do you think its just as likely that it would cost more to fix it than it's worth? I would use this guy as a protable media library for my car, so battery life is not an issue.


Reply1
I have had really good luck with rockbox. I currently pretty much leave my 30G 4Gvideo in the car all the time, though I need to swap it with the rockbox30G-4Video.

There are a couple of other ones out there, but so far all but the Shuffle have been gifts to us, and the shuffle was a gift to me from Beth. It is the least uesed because I forget to turn it off. If you cant get to the HD from the IPOD FirwareOS, crack it open your self run diskwarrior or spinrite on it and see what is going on. There are plenty of hidden menus to let you know what is going on with the IPOD, I just don't remember them off the top of my head.


OP Response 1
It shows up on "My Computer" as a disk drive, but says no disk is available. Since I don't have Spinrite or diskwarrior, what if I sent it to you? would you be interested in fiddling with it?

Reply2
Diskwarrior is for macs, sprinrite for PCs. This is a DMG (Mac ISO) so you might be able to open it.

No, I am not splitting with my 4G_Videos.

SOME BLOG I LIFTED
Select+left to get to serv menu, and there are some diagnostics you can run.
Select+right to get to verbose boot
Select+down to get to disk mode
up stalls boot
down loads linux (with rockbox as bootloader)
Hold 'on'' loads apple boot loader

Happy Friday folks! This week's topic is all about helping Chuck out with recovering data from his daughter's corrupt hard drive. Before we begin, I cannot stress how important it is to backup your data, so that you do not find yourself in this situation. With that said, if you haven't backed up your data lately, get to it! Now, let's move on to the topic.

Well, Chuck, there are two possible ways a hard drive can become corrupt, one way is a physical failure (when something mechanically goes wrong within the drive--bad platter, bad circuit board, and so on), and the other way is logical failure (when the drive physically works, but data on the drive is in a corrupt state and it can be caused by a range of issues from viruses to file corruption.) If you read through the answers by our members, physical drive failure are by far more difficult to retrieve data from, as the mechanics need to be fixed, whereas logically failures, while not easy, are recoverable through third-party software, or costly services that specialize in data recovery. Either way, no method is guaranteed to recover your data completely.

This week, our members' solutions to your questions varied, as there are many methods to hard drive recovery--ranging from what software they used to retrieve date from logical drive failures, to the method of freezing the hard drive (which many recommend to be the last resort.) There are simply no wrong or right answers, just a bunch of different approaches. So, give all our members' advice and recommendations a read. I will mention that when it came to recommending a data recovery utility, a few titles that where mentioned more frequently than others were, SpinRite from Gibson Research and Ontrack Easy Recovery, both will cost you a bit of money. However, there were other options, which is to use Knoppix or Ubuntu Live Linux CD that are free to download. Overall, there were many helpful answers. I truly believe that after you read through these recommendations, you'll have some good ideas what to start with. I've selected a few answers to get you all going in the Q&A section, so check them out. Again, as a reminder to all you folks, back up your data and do it frequently, so you won't have to go through this stressful experience. Take care everyone and thank you all for your contributions to the question. Good luck Chuck and, if you have a chance, let us know what worked out for you.

Cheers!
- Lee


OP Response2
        hmm. so the process would be to attempt to load rockbox... then fix the HD, then see if I can plug it into my ipod car controller and get ti to play. if not, could I reinstall Apple firmware? I don't understand the sentences about getting to the HD from the iPOD firmwareOS.

I did some more research, and everything indicates that it is a hardware problem. got an old 4th gen (grey) that you'd be willing to sacrifice the HD out of? I was wrong about it showing up as a disk drive on My Computer... that's my printers memory stick reader.



Reply3
I know you have an ipod control but it would be cheaper to get a maestro GPS navigator, hack it, put on a mp3 player and use it for your music, albeit in 2GB libraries