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

[Andrew Beals]

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.
> >
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