psipsy

Way back in 2008 I bought myself an Ipod Classic with the 160GB hard drive, and I had been using it ever since. Given that it was in 2008, my main computer at the time was my G4 Powerbook, so naturally I had it formatted for Mac, HFS+. Given that I transferred Itunes duty from Mac to Windows only a couple years later, that may have been a bit short-sighted of me. Oh well.

In 2014, Apple announced they were discontinuing the Ipod Classic, and I was able to find a new one that was still in stock at Microcenter. The idea being that the new Classic would eventually take over for the old one. I found I couldn't simply drag-and-drop the contents; everything had to be done via Itunes, so I decided to keep using the old one anyway.

There was a bit of a scare in 2017 when it went into a restart loop, something that I got it out of only because I still had my G4 Powerbook. The device worked fine after that, at least for a while, but I knew the hard drive was starting to fail.

I really should have seen this coming when a month ago I went to edit some tags on some songs that played normally, but the act of editing the tags would cause the host computer to blue-screen. I ended up re-encoding the original file, editing the tags there, and then pushing it onto the Ipod. There were also times when it would lock up on its own and need a force restart, and this increased in frequency. I knew the day was going to come, I just didn't know when.

Well, that day finally came, when I connected it to my computer to add some songs, it locked up, and went into another restart loop. There is a diagnostic menu, which tells me there is a pending sector reallocation. I can see how that would cause some problems, especially if the data in that sector was important to the function of the device rather than a music file. The hard drive has been trying and trying to reallocate it, but can't move on for whatever reason.

The way I got out of the first restart loop in 2017 was by connecting it to my old Powerbook and counter-intuitively trying to reformat it. I think the reason why that worked back then was the attempt at reformatting forced the hard drive itself to reallocate whatever sector was sticking in its craw. Alas, that didn't work this time. I'm able to put it in disk mode, but it doesn't show up as a mountable volume, and no software seems to be able to reach it.

As a further complication, since my Powerbook is so old, it's limited to an older version of Itunes, which no longer has the ability to run the restore process on the Ipod. (It needs to connect to a server at Apple, who likely changed something on their end.) The only thing I could do there is find a new(er) Powerbook with a new(er) version of Itunes and see if that can wrench it back to life. And there's no guarantee that will work.

At this point I've accepted the hard drive is about dead. I was hoping I could bring it back to life, just for a little bit, just long enough to export all of the playlists. I'm not worried about the files themselves, those are on both the computer and server. I'm kicking myself for not making more recent backups of those playlists when I knew the hard drive was wearing out. At the same time, if I can't save the playlists, I can accept that. It gives me a chance at a fresh start on some of them, and I can recreate others.

So, my future plans for this dead Ipod are naturally, to bring it back to life in a modified form. I already have it opened up. There is a device called the iflash, which is for the express purpose of replacing the stock hard drive with either SD cards, microSD, or an mSATA drive, depending on need for capacity or speed. To go the whole way to 1TB, as I plan to, mSATA seems to be the more reasonable way. Then again, just by virtue of putting in a single 256GB SD card, that would give it more capacity than original. But, I already have the 1TB mSATA, so that's how I'm going to roll.

While it's open, I'll also replace the battery, since that doesn't hold a charge like it used to. When that's all back together, the Ipod should have a full 1TB of SSD storage, and a fresh battery with more capacity than before.

This isn't the only Ipod I have that is in need of some kind of repair. There's an Ipod Touch with a weak battery and a goofy screen. It was for an experiment and I didn't pay much for it in the first place so nothing to be mad about. There's also an Ipod Nano that I found in the electronic waste pile at work. It wasn't there accidentally, as it appeared to have been wiped clean by the previous owner and the battery is completely dead in less than an hour.

You might be wondering how I'm able to use any kind of Mac-formatted device on a Windows computer. That would be via some software called MacDrive. It is something I've been using for years and it's useful enough that I've put it on multiple computers.

You might also be wondering if anyone really needs 1TB in a music player. Funny thing is, I've found that my most-used playlists will fit easily on the Ipod Touch that has only 32GB. The reason why I'm going large is because of harvesting. What I often do is push a load of audio files onto the Ipod, just about filling it, then listen to those as I'm driving. Later on I'll sort through them, putting songs I like into appropriate playlists, and deleting the ones that don't jive with me.

Well, if this project goes through, I'll be able to put the whole damn library on and go from there, and I won't have to worry about a platter hard drive fizzling out again. For what it's worth, any direct replacement hard drives that are available are all used and may or may not have their own problems. Oh, and they also have a proprietary connection and there's no way to connect them to a computer outside of the Ipod device. With mSATA? Adapters abound.

More importantly, when the opportunity for such an upgrade presents itself, why not?