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itouch rulz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 3, 2008
124
0
Hello - a bit long winded, sorry.

A little story. I have a 30GB iPod 5th generation I believe. Video out, colour screen etc. It's given me good service but since I've had an iPhone I don't tend to carry I around (last 2 years). For the past year it has been a hide-away unit in the glove box of my car providing music for the car sound system (pioneer f20bt if you must know).

Anyway, once in a while I bring it into the house to update the music, ie, sync with iTunes on my iMac. I did this about 3 weeks ago and it wouldn't sync, lots of odd errors, error 1416 and a bunch of others. The existing music was ok but I couldn't add any more. So I kept pushing it and googling various tricks to try, eg, restore, use disk utility to repair permissions, full reformat, target disk mode etc. Nothing worked and (obviously) I ended up with no songs on it as well due to the restores and all that. In fact it seemed the more I tried the worse it got and would not even restore any more.

I got so desperate I even took it to the local Apple Store and met with a Genius Bar dude. He pretty much went through all the same things I had tried and eventually said, the hard drive was failing and there was nothing that could be done. They would take it from me and give me 10% toward a new iPod but that's all they could do. I took it away to think about. I have an iPhone and my wife has a old iPod nano (and we have a couple of iPads) so felt it was a bit ott to buy a brand new iPod just for the car, but it is bloody handy just tucked away and with decent capacity very handy.

I left it a few weeks and early yesterday morning I saw it sitting by the computer and thought I'll plug it in and give it a try. It restored ok but then failed syncing. I thought that was strange because it hadn't even been able to restore for a while and I wondered why. Now it's winter here, I'm in Australia so it's not exactly cold but still maybe 16C inside overnight. We were going out and I thought, I'll pop the iPod in the fridge and try and sync it when we come back. 3 hours later I tried syncing it and I got 500 songs on before it failed (but the songs were still there). I then took it back and forth a few times to the fridge for 20 minutes at a time and got 200 or so songs on each time. I then had a brain wave and put an ice brick/slicka pad under the iPod while it was syncing (ie, one of those plastic blocks that you freeze and put in an esky/chilly bin/ice chest). Doing this I could get 1,800 songs on at a time before it failed.

iPod now back in glove box and working fine. Not sure for how long but seems ok.
 
Last edited:

itouch rulz

macrumors regular
Original poster
Sep 3, 2008
124
0
Yeah, since I did this I googled a bit and it seems some people put computer hard drives that have failed in the deep freeze as a last ditch effort to extract data from them, ie, remove hard drive from computer, put in deep freeze for a few hours and then reattach and people sometimes get 20 minutes use to extract their data.

My iPod seems to (so far) only have issues when you try to put more music on it so this has worked for me so far when I'm just using it to play music. I'll report back when it fails for good.
 
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