Background: It’s a 1st gen 4GB ipod nano, bought back in October 2005. I’ve been using my old (2003, I think) ipod charger to recharge the batteries for the last 14 months.
The battery life’s been slowly falling over the past year, from around 14 hours now to maybe 10.
Thus far, zero problems.
Now:
2 nights ago, the battery charge was down to almost nothing, so I recharged it. It took its normal time to recharge. Last night, when I picked it up and tried turning it on, nothing happened.
It’s not responding to the clickwheel buttons or the ‘hold’ slider on top. Plugging in the power doesn’t light up the screen like it normally does.
Any ideas? Has anyone faced something like this with their nano’s (or other ipod’s)? Is my ipod dead?!
Have you tried resetting it? You switch the “hold” switch on the top from left to right, then immediately back to left. Then hold down the “Menu” and middle button for about ten seconds until the boot-up apple appears. This should reboot the iPod without dumping the contents.
I don’t know about the Nano, but I had one of those regular iPods that had battery issues and I ordered a kit to replace the battery myself. It was surprisingly easy, albeit terrifying.
The toughest part is getting the case open. I did it several times with a 4G 40-gig iPod. Something was screwed up with my thing to the point where the only way to get the hard drive to work at times was to physically unplug it from the battery. I’m not saying that that’s the OPs problem, just that once you figure out how to get into the case it’s really quite easy.
It might be worth restoring the iPod’s internal software. If you plug in the iPod and open iTunes, the iPod should show up on the left side of iTunes, with several tabs occupying the right side of the window. The first tab should be titled “Summary.” If you click on this tab, you should see two large buttons in the middle of the screen. One says “Check for Update” and the other says “Restore.” I’ve never tried this, but the description by the button says “If you are experiencing problems with your iPod, you can restore its original settings by clicking Restore.” Seems worth a try.
The Nano is flash-mem, right? Then I’m really sure that whatever problem the OP is having is nothing like the problem I was having. I think my problem was caused by too many shocks to the hard drive, because at times I could just hear it go “click click thunk thunk” while trying to access data.
