iPod Is my iPod Fried?

[lindmar]

So the problems started yesterday, itunes told me I had to restore my ipod... The problems actually started a few days ago, every song just randomly skipping to the next tune 30 seconds, 40 seconds, half way through songs.

I can hear some clicking going on, but I've heard this for years, its a 4th gen ipod.

So I restored, but still problems. So I tried zero'ing out the drive in Disc Utility, get an input/output error.

The drive comes up in disk utility, but I can't do anything. Can't partition, can't erase.. keeping getting i/o errors.

Is my ipod toast?!

EDIT
Just got the thing to intialize in itunes again? So I dont know. I will try copying some songs and see..

 

[0098386]

A clicking HDD isn't sign of a total death, it could be the sound of a slow one. I bought a laptop in 2003, within 6 months the HDD was clicking and couldn't perform a defrag again. It's still working now despite there being an obvious flaw with the drive.

Maybe time to fix or just buy a new iPod.

Have you tried running the iPod Diagnostics mode? I don't know about the 4G but theres an option on my 3G and IIRC my 5G that checks for HDD faults.

 

[foidulus]

My ipod did the same thing

back in May I had a similar issue, even got the sad iPod icon, but then miraculously it came back to life. Fast forward 5 months and it died again, right after a sync of a bunch of pictures, and now whenever I plug it into a mac, I get a ton of "data underrun" errors on the console..... I pretty much have declared it DoA(though it still starts up fine, I wonder if I could replace the hd)

Hope yours gets better and stays that way.