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

[Andrei Chichak]

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.
> 
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