Last night, I came to the conclusion that my old iPod with Video (5G) had finally died out, it was my first iPod, my first HDD-based MP3 player, and the first to be over 1GB in capacity (my iPod was 30 GB).The symptoms of impending failure were very minor. For about two years now, I've occasionally got the "You need to restore this iPod" message at start up or as I connected the device to iTunes, but the messages were really rare, and when they did occur, disconnecting the iPod and doing a reset (hold down "Select" and "Menu" for 6+ seconds) cleared up the issue. Occasionally, the iTunes database would be corrupted, and I would have to restore the iPod. Very annoying, but not the worst thing that could happen.
That is, until yesterday, when I synched up some video podcasts. I was getting behind on them and decided that using the iPod 5G would be the best option to get caught up -- the battery on my nano is starting to go anyway, requiring it to be on the charger more and more these days than. However, upon trying to play the video podcasts on the iPod 5G, the video would start although it would eventually have some type of processing problem and skip to the next episode or continue playing the sound while not updating the video. Sometimes, it would just give up and out-right freeze, requiring a reset of the device to get it up and running again. At first, I thought this was just symptoms of a poorly encoded video file stressing the iPod's CPU and causing it to crash and require a reset.
Unfortunately these frequent resets only seemed to make things worse over the evening. After two or three of those force-resets, the device powered back on and said that it was corrupted and needed to be connected to iTunes to be restored.
The restore went fine, but when I attempted to synch for the first time (a manual synch of a few dozen audio podcasts), the iPod crashed again and needed to be reset, and once again, restored.
But, this time, the restore function didn't work out so well. It seemed to freeze up as the iPod System Software was being installed, and even though the device wasn't disconnected from the Macintosh, the Mac said that it had been improperly removed. Retrying the restore didn't work either, the device was getting worse, freezing right after being connected via USB and by this time, it was crashing iTunes as well.
It seemed I was out of luck. None of the diagnostics said that there was anything wrong with the iPod, yet it seems to be having more and more difficulty starting up. It even seems to have trouble getting past the Apple logo and into diag mode now, which deepened my concern that the iPod was in serious hardware failure.
I'm pretty sure that it is hard drive failure that is getting to the device, but the Apple system diagnostics (upon reset, press and hold "Select" and "Previous" as the iPod is starting up), I found nothing wrong listed in the system diagnostics for the HDD... But, the diagnostics only list the SMART data for the drive, it doesn't actually do any sector by sector analysis.
I did do some research on running SprinRite on the iPod, but it looks like if I am to do that, I'll need to order special drive converters, disassemble the iPod and then attach the iPod's HDD to my computer (via IDE) and run SpinRite that way. I was hoping for an easier fix, such as being able to run SpinRite via USB, but it seems "via usb" isn't an option.
My only other recourse available last night was to run Disk Utility on the device, which returned no problems. The only remaining thing I can think of to try would be some of the Mac drive diagnostic utilities, which may have something in there that can work on a USB drive - I haven't gone though this option as of yet.
For the interim, I am more than able to just get by with my iPod nano (1G). I'll be looking forward to getting the latest iPod nano once the battery in this one starts to go so I can start watching videos on my iPod again, yet at the same time, I really will miss my nano 1G. Perhaps a trip to the Apple store is warranted after work sometime this week.
