Missing Link

A few days ago, I wrote about my ipod’s hard drive failing, and how I was going about fixing it. At that point, I hadn’t yet recieved the replacement drive I had ordered, so I wasn’t able to detail the final portions of the repair.

As I mentioned in my post last night about how I want to get a Macbook Pro (seriously, my birthday is coming up… in 23 days), I successfully repaired the iPod. The finishing steps were remarkably simple, and having a fully working iPod only took me a total of 10 minutes of actual work.

The most difficult part of this hard drive installation was opening the fedex box it was shipped in. Once I had it out, I affixed the blue rubber bumpers, and the blue foam pad to the drive and hooked it into the ribbon cable as the previous drive had been. The case covers then snapped together perfectly, as before. At this point, you have an ipod with a blank hard drive in it. If you try to turn it on, you get a folder icon with an exclamation point (which, if you look it up on apple’s site, usually means the software needs to be restored, which in our case is quite true).

From there, I plugged the iPod into my powerbook. I already had iTunes open, and it promptly informed me that the ipod that was connected needed to be restored because it appeared to be corrupted. I expected, and anticipated that . I hit the restore button, which took it through the process of re-installing the iPod software onto the iPod. This took a matter of 10-15 seconds, very fast. I was then prompted to plug my iPod into an external power source, in my case the external power adapter that came with it (I’m not sure how the newer generation will handle this, since they don’t come with external adapters, perhaps they aren’t required to perform this step?). Once I did this, my iPod flashed through some stuff, asked my preferred language, and basically went through the initial setup as if it were a brand new iPod.

From there, it was just another plug in to the powerbook to download my music library onto it.

All in all, the whole process went incredibly fast, and was mostly painless. I definitely don’t recommend it to anyone who has a warranty or applecare, as it will void that. If, however, you’ve got an older iPod that isn’t covered anymore, and you don’t feel like spending a ton of money on buying a new one, this is definitely a fairly easy alternative if you don’t mind tinkering. Besides, there’s something strangely satisfying about repairing your own iPod.