[NTLK] OT: iPod hard drive blue foam, does one need it?

[Andrew Beals]

As it turns out, the headphone jack connector & ribbon cable for the
3rd gen iPods appears to be unobtanium.

In good news, though, I disassembled a handful of HDDs recently and in
addition to recovering the magnets for my fridge and platters for a
mobile-to-come, I saved off some thin sticky and presumably insulating
foam off of the bottom of their circuit boards, which will go into my
iPod Photo when I tackle it next week.  (HDD cables *are* available
for that)

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 10:24 AM, Andrew Beals <andrew.beals at gmail.com> wrote:
> I'll have to take it apart and do a visual inspection of the cable then.  I
> got an el-cheapo 32GB CF card that did the trick for a while before it
> flaked out.  (iPod Photo)  It could be that the 60GB drive that was in it
> wasn't the problem.  It's been "hard drive" flakey (according to the
> minimalist error message that shows) for years - which is why it was given
> to me in the first place.
>
> When I took my iPod 3G (40GB) apart, I had a stupid attack and tore the
> headphone connector cable apart … like I did a few years prior.  Given that
> it's sporting its original HDD, I think that it actually had suffered from
> HDD failure.  Guess I'll see what the prices on replacements are this
> time…ugh.  Rotten design.
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 9:35 AM, Andrei Chichak <newton at chichak.ca> wrote:
>>
>> I had enough parts that I could mix and match. A replacement cable was
>> $1.95 (!) and a 60G HD was $35. You couldn't get much of an MP3 player for
>> $36.95 plus shipping.
>>
>> A new HD with an old cable wouldn't boot. Inspecting the zif connector
>> showed that the connector had broken the solder joints with the ribbon
>> cable. The replacement from iFixIt was similarly broken and was refunded.
>> The replacement replacement from GadgetMenders was good.
>>
>> PCBs are pretty passive, unless you have a capacitor dry out or it has
>> some sort of trauma, the PCB shouldn't be a problem.
>>
>> An  old hard drive with a new cable had the beast boot, but my 60G HD was
>> now a 15G. I remember the event that caused this, but no combination of disk
>> mode, Linux dd, Windows formatting, or Mac Disk Utility would fix the
>> formatting. HDs really don't like the final nanosecond of being dropped.
>>
>> A new HD with a new cable was the trick. My beast has been in daily use
>> for 8 years. People point and call it "old". No mate, the Dead Sea Scrolls
>> are old, Newtons are old, I have t-shirts older than my iPod. It's pretty
>> new.
>>
>> (I've also been using my MacBook Pro for 4 1/2 years now. Previously I
>> would use Dell laptops which would split their cases after about 1 year and
>> then something inside would break. So the MBP has been pretty cheap really.)
>>
>> Andrei
>>
>> On 2013-June-18, at 8:15 AM, Andrew Beals <andrew.beals at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Motion control.  And did you try your old hard drive (do they have SMART
>> > info you can get at?) before tossing it?  I swapped a HDD for a SSD (CF
>> > in
>> > an adaptor/carrier) in an older iPod and it turned out that it was
>> > actually
>> > the PCB (heck, it might be the ribbon cable, but I doubt that) being old
>> > and cranky.  It will be replaced with a cheaper player, probably a
>> > Sandisk
>> > Sansa.  I'll most probably move all of my music over to linux as well at
>> > that point.
>> >
>> > ====================================================================
>> > The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://newtontalk.net/
>> > The Official Newton FAQ     - http://splorp.com/newton/faq/
>> > The Newton Glossary         - http://splorp.com/newton/glossary/
>> > WikiWikiNewt                - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
>> > ====================================================================
>>
>>
>> ====================================================================
>> The NewtonTalk Mailing List - http://newtontalk.net/
>> The Official Newton FAQ     - http://splorp.com/newton/faq/
>> The Newton Glossary         - http://splorp.com/newton/glossary/
>> WikiWikiNewt                - http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
>> ====================================================================
>
>