[NTLK] OT - Off Topic - Re: Pod hard drive blue foam, does one need it?

[Frank Gruendel]

Since it is inside a closed case, it would have a hard time keeping the HD
cooler since it wouldn't have much of a chance to get rid of the heat. I'm
pretty sure it is there to protect the hard disk from rattling around in
your iPod.

Be aware that (at least in my experience) most "dead" iPod drives aren't
dead at all. Of seven seemingly dead drives I've run through both a PC and a
Mac hard disk test program, six were perfectly OK. The reason their iPod
wouldn't boot was because they suffered from data corruption in the firmware
partition. By now one of these drives has been running perfectly for months
in an iPod Dock Connector (aka iPod 3G) after I formatted and partitioned it
on my Mac and installed the firmware using the old Mac iPod Updater. Two
other drives did at least pass a one day test in iPods of the same model
after undergoing the same treatment. Which doesn't mean they aren't still
working. I've just not had the need to test them further, since the third
iPod has been working hunky dory since September 2012.

Cheers

Frank

PS Since some people on this list (myself not included) are only interested
in Newton-related post and are filtering posts based on their subject line,
allow me to humbly suggest to preface the subject lines of posts like this
with "OT - Off Topic - ".

-- Newton software and hardware at http://www.pda-soft.de