Recently, my 2 year old 4G iPod broke. I was listening to a podcast whilst walking to work when the audio froze. I took it out of my pocket and found that everything had frozen – the UI as well as playback.
I tried to reset it on the move, but nothing could unfreeze it. I had to wait until the battery ran down, which took nearly a day in its paraplegic state.
Upon connecting to the mains adapter after it had finally ran out of power, the iPod restarted, but a sad face stared out from me, and nothing could get rid of it. I restarted it again, tried to force it into disk mode, but all to no avail. Just a new icon saying things really were up the creek and I needed to take my iPod to someone to have it fixed.
Arse.
So it’s sat on my desk for a couple of weeks, waiting for me to have time to take it to the Apple Store in Southampton. Until today. For some reason, while shopping for food, an idea occurred. Tehmina‘s iPod (a trusty 2G iPod still going strong) dates from the time when Firewire was the only option, and iPods were Mac only (oh those were the days!). I have been using the supplied USB connection on my iPod thus far. It shouldn’t make any difference, but since I had nothing to lose, I thought I’d give it a go.
Whilst I’m typing this, my ‘broken’ iPod is syncing with iTunes.
When I plugged it in with a Firewire lead, it mounted on the desktop straight away, iTunes launched, and told me that I needed to restore my iPod. One click of the “Restore” button, one iPod reboot, and all seems back to normal.
So, if you’re reading this because you’re having trouble with your iPod, try connecting it to your Mac with a Firewire lead, if you’re lucky enough to know someone who has one.
I’ll be trying to source my own iPod Firewire lead – not only has it ‘fixed’ my iPod, but the sync is happening much much faster.