recently my 80GB iPod classic has been acting up. I use it in my cars, one with Ford SYNC and the other with a Sony aftermarket receiver. Both connected with the USB cable. In either car, if I try to select certain tracks/albums, it’ll skip over a bunch and eventually hang. If I disconnect, I can control the iPod but if I try to play the problematic tracks, I’ll hear the hard drive spin up and immediately spin back down, and it won’t play. If I connect it to my computer it’ll fail to mount and the UI on the iPod will be frozen, with a hard reset the only way to get it back. I’ve wiped it, reformatted it, and restored it, and it’s still fritzy. the problem tracks play fine in iTunes, and worked fine in the past. they’re mp3s so there shouldn’t be any DRM issues.
the funny thing is that the issue seems to be with entire albums, not random individual tracks.
My 30 GB 5th Generation iPod video is doing about the same thing. It has been like this for a few months. I restored/reloaded it once and it is still acting funny. I only use it in the car (actually, my boyfriend’s car - I use a Nano in my car), and I actually feel lucky the thing is still working. It’s about 6-7 years old.
I’m tagging along on this thread to see what suggestions you get…
I’ve had my 80 GB iPod since…2007-ish? Every once in a while, if I start to go really fast through tracks (i.e.: hitting scroll wheel button really quickly on a long list of songs) it’ll freeze up on me. It makes that little hard drive whrrrr-noise too.
This used to happen a lot when I’d go to the gym, for whatever reason, and I can remember distinctly being frustrated that I had no music to end my workout with.
I did some research, and found that you can get it to turn off manually by pressing down hard on the center button of the scroll wheel and the menu button for up to 10 seconds or so. This should help it shut off and wake back up; let it rest for a minute though.
Have you tried running a drive utility on it? You could mount it as an external drive (check “Enable disk use” in iTunes), then launch the utility of your choice and see if there are any bad blocks on the drive itself.
A HD diagnostic via the USB connector is not really going to help.
There is a diagnostic mode accessible on iPods using various key presses. Google for the one for your particular model. Look for a disk test/SMART info.
If you have iTunes loaded (!), you can run some diagnostics using it.
The HD on mine went bad. (I dropped it.) The diagnostics indicates a lot of bad/pending sectors. Ordered a new HD and popped it in the other day. Had to reload the software via iTunes (!). So I had to install that crap and then uninstall it and then really uninstall it. (Nice job Apple!) Runs great now.
The real trick is taking it apart without damaging anything. Especially the ribbon cables or case. Lots of videos and such about that on the Net.
One “trick” some people claim works is to put thin cardboard pieces against the HD to press on it a little. I think they are fooling themselves into thinking this is an actual fix.
yeah, I did try running a disk check in Windows and nothing came up. Thanks ftg for cluing me in about diagnostic mode; the SMART values don’t look out of sorts. There are 0 reallocated sectors and 0 pending sectors, leads me to believe the disk is OK. Though I think it’s rather funny that it lists the “max temp” of the HDD as “241 C,” if it got that hot I’d have expected the platters to demagnetize and the battery to burst into flames
I found a thread on the Apple discussion forums where people have been having similar issues with their iPod classics, apparently some of them have been problematic since new:
I wonder if I just coincidentally ran into a firmware bug. I’ve even tried wiping the iPod and copying only the problem tracks to it, and they still all get skipped. I just can’t for the life of me figure out what changed.
The same tracks? It seems really unlikely that the same tracks would be laid onto the same disk sectors. This leads me to guess the music files themselves are corrupted. Have you listened to the tracks as they reside on your PC or Mac drive?
which is why I’m stumped. I could understand if, each time I copied my entire (46 GB) music library over, it would arrange things the same way. But when I only copy over the 2 dozen problem tracks (and nothing else) I can’t believe it would put those tracks on the exact same disk location as if I synced the entire library.
I know the files themselves are fine because they’ve played fine on this very iPod in the recent past. I tried using iTunes to convert the tags with no success.
