Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland
My brother Justin loved his 20 gig 4th generation ipod until he dropped it at the gym one day. It stopped working all together and would make clicking noises when he would try to start it.
He had gotten it as a gift and didnt have the reciept for it, so he couldnt take it back unter warrenty I guess. Apple said that it would cost $250 to fix. Instead of fixing it, he spend the money on
a 30 gig 5th generation. I asked him for the broken ipod so I could tinker with it. After I got it from him, I decided that it would be cool to own an ipod, and that if i could fix it for less then the
retail price, I would be a head of the game. I documented my adventure of trying to fix my ipod, check it out.
- When I would start the ipod, I would get an icon of a folder and a warning sign. The ipod would then make a bunch of clicking noises. That make me think that the hard drive was crapped out.
- Since it was already broken, why not take it apart and try to make it work. There was no clear way to ebter the ipod, so I decided to pry off the metal back using the thinnest screw driver I could find.
It wasnt that hard to work the screw drive between the metal and the plastic. I worked the screw driver down the side of the case, until it popped off.
- I flipped the ipod over, and opened it up slowly, I noticed that there was a ribbon cable connecting the guts if the ipod to the jacks mounted to the metal back. I was careful not to mess this connection up.
- The ipod uses an ide harddrive, the connector pulled directly off without any problems. I now hard the bad harddrive free,
- The drive had blue rubber bumpers wrapped around it, and on the back, there was a foam mat that was glued to the drive.
- Removing the bumpers was no problem, they pulled directly off with out any fight.
- I tried to pull the foam off the drive by pulling on it, but that wasnt working, so I desided to get a razor blade scraper and screape it off. It worked well.
- Once I had the foam off, I could see that it was a toshiba drive. Model MK2004GAL. I looke dofr replacements online, but was only able to find the model MK2006GAL. I compared the MK2004GAL and the MK2006GAL, and didnt see any big differences, so I ordered one. 3 days letter I had my new drive. It didnt have the apple logo on it, but who cares, it was only $100!
- The blue bumpers went on with out a problem, and fit like a glove.
- To get the foam to stick to the new drive, I went super ghetto and reached in my desk, and came up with a glue stick! Hey, it goet the job done.
- The new drive went in, just like the old one came out. I connected the IDE connection, and I was ready to close it up.
- I put the back on, and pressed down on it evenly. The back snapped without any problems.
- Next, I downloaded the ipod updater (11-17-2005) from apple.com, and installed it. I hooked up my newly rebuilt ipod, and did a restore. It went really fast.
- After the restore, I had to hook up my ipod to the wall charger. I didnt have one on hand so i tried all kinds of methods of going around it. In the middle of me trying to hack around it, My buddy chris called, I told him to bring over his wall charger.
- 5 minutes later Chris showed up with a charger. I plugged in the ipod, it reset itself, and then I was up and running with my newly rebuilt ipod.
I was really supprised at how easy it was to replace the hard drive in a 4th gen ipod. Im sure that someone is going to call me an idiot for opening the case that way. I dont care though. I got this thing working and that all that matters, and I did it for under $100. Screw apple for wanting to charge $250 for 20 munites worth of work and $100 worth of parts.
I hope that through my experience, someone else can bring back to life one of their dead ipods.
Follow me on twitter for more great tips. CLICK HERE – twitter.com/JoshHighland
{ 1146 comments… read them below or add one }
Next Comments →
Impressive! I’ve been wondering how to do that in the quite likely event that my ipod dies (I drop it alot). Using elmers glue may not have been the best idea, since the hard drive does get fairly hot.
nicely done. this is awesome for people like me who didn’t purchase any added warranty for their iPod. thanks for the info, josh!
I’m bookmarking this for future reference…glad I saw it on the diggnation site…
never know when I might need it.
thanks for such clear cut directions, and pics.
Nice Job. I, too, am bookmarking this for future referance.
That is not a broken IPOD.. A Sad face will show you it is bad. i recently had that and the Hard Drive was clicking and what I did was put it on a computer that did not have ITUNES installed and used windows to format it like it was a regular hard drive. the when you plug it in just restore it and it should work.
What size drive did you replace with? Did you find upsized drives available? If so, what sizes did you find? Can you provide us with some links to sites that sell the replacement drives?
Cool, I’ll rember that, although it seems more likely that I’ll need a new battery sooner than a new harddrive anyone know where I can get one of those?
Wow, someone actually put something useful on the intarwebs!
Wonder what would have happened if you has popped in a 100GB laptop drive?
Where did you get the new 1.8 HDD? I’ve been looking online, but can’t find a good, cheap source. Any ideas?
You get an iPod Battery from http://ipodbattery.com.
Awesome blog!! Maybe I can buy a used ipod with HD problems from Ebay. Maybe it’s worth a shot.
Very nice tutorial. It will come in handy someday. Hopefully not soon
Congrats on the fix. However, why can’t people who post stories take the extra ten seconds to make sure they actually spelled words correctly? It would certainly add some credibility to the post.
Bah!
i havew fixed ipods that have lost a connection with the hardrive. Even the sad face, ive fixed two!
This involves having two ipods and switching their hard drives, this only works for 4th gens though i havent figured it out for the pile of 3rd gens i have. i swapped two 4th hard drives that each gave me the sad face and tried to mount with an apple and i got both mounted from the same computer, A folder icon on a fourth gen means it needs to be repaired and zeroed out with Norton disk doctor or disk utility on a macintosh.Both ipods were bought off ebay with HD problems. One i had to replace the mother board after constant unmounting and restoring. I think it was sat on for a long period of time warping the board and causing circuits to short. But I spent and fixed two Ipods with ”claimed HD problems” for less than a used or refurbished from apple.
Not to say your way doesnt work, but mine was doing the same exact problem, showing either the pic shown above or a sad face on it, and I was able to fix it by either:
A) Slide the hold button back and forth about 10 time quickly, and then Hold down: Menu/middle button/pause.play button, this puts the ipod into some special mode with which I was then able to restore it via the itunes restore program. Problem is, a few weeks later the problem came back with the error screen and clicking noise, so…
B) Simply hold it in one hand, and smack it with your other hand. I was told do try this by a friend online, and wa-la, it has not had a single problem since which was over 2 months ago. Saves a ton of time, not to mention the money for a new drive.
While some may say beating the crap out of your ipod is a bad idea, it does work
Now I haven’t gotten a sad Ipod icon yet, but I have gotten the battery and far more often the folder icon. One thing that seems to be the biggest problem is that the unit continuously resets itself making it impossible to mount.
Any ideas?
TO LoathRevolver -
google it.
http://www.interloper.com/products/product-details.php?productid=53030331&cat=530
Christ… it finally booted after the “hold and slap” move. CMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON…
Second grade teacher, you are not very helpful. You teach second grade. What happened to “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all.” Or are you teaching them to be anal and annoying. This post obviously was meant to be helpful.
You are god. I fall to my knees and worship you.
Uh…Thanks
BRILLANT! FASTIDIOUS JOB DOCUMENTING YOUR ADVENTURE!! THX
20 On Tuesday, 12-27-2005 @ 04:41pm, Ginger said…
Second grade teacher, you are not very helpful. You teach second grade. What happened to “if you can’t say something nice, don’t say it at all.” Or are you teaching them to be anal and annoying. This post obviously was meant to be helpful.
******************
Take your own advice bitch
Just to let you know in the beginning, I have had that folder come up before and that doesn’t mean that the hard drive is corrupt. All you would have to do it read the manual and it tells you how to bring the hdd back to normal. So you might have just wasted $100.00 for nothing when you could have just read the manual to see how to bring it back to normal.
actually, the drive wouldnt spin up. if you shook the ipod you could hear something was rolling around in the hard drive. It made a horrible clicking / grinding noise. Trust me, I have been around computers enough to know when a HD goes bad. I wish i would have ripped the drive apart and document it. Thanks for all the responces!
You were able to do it for 100 because you cut the capacity down to 20gig? A 40gig would have only cost 31 bucks more on eWiz.com, why didnt you go for the same size drive?
http://www.ewiz.com/query.php?categry=59&brand=Toshiba&dp=1&dt=&categry=59&brand=Toshiba&pa0=&pa1=&pa2=&pa3=&pa4=&pa5=&searchStr=Search+from+current+results&myanchor=%23displaytop&categry=59&brand=Toshiba&pa0=&pa1=&pa2=&pa3=&pa4=1.8+inch&pa5=&nl=10&searchStr=Search+from+current+results&ob=&myanchor=%23displaytop
Great guide! But are you sure it’s that easy?
Probably it’s time to REVIVE my dead iPod too…
If just to teach how to open an iPod, your blog is really worth it.
Great job boy, great job!
“if you shoot the ipod you could hear something was rolling aroun din the hard drive. ”
Uh yeah. Shooting your iPod is not recommended.
“if you shoot the ipod you could hear something was rolling aroun din the hard drive. ”
Uh yeah. Shooting your iPod is not recommended.
Great job!
I have a 20GG ipod is an older model w/no vidio.Can i change the hard drive on it so i can download vidio music??
Excellent! I got my iPod wet (not on purpose), and had to take it apart, dry off the circuit boards, etc. It worked for a few months, but slowly started acting up. First, it wouldn’t connect with the computer anymore. It would charge, but no detection on the PC. Next, it wouldn’t charge anymore, so I knew, a few more days and it was history. I gave it a decent burial, but kept the HD. So my Q is this: How can I hook up a 3rd gen 30GB HD to a standard PC IDE controller? Anybody have a linky?
BOO
here is the best method to fix your ipod…
1. get a hammer
2. bash it for a few hours to releive stress
3 get a better player.. http://www.creative.com/products/mp3/
Holy Christ! Hold and Slap! I was ready to go out tomorrow and shell out 400 bucks on a new video ipod. Now after smacking my old one and it coming back to life — forget it!
The price on iPod repairs by apple is so high, because they vary rarely repair them… they just replace them with the same model (a bunch of the replacements have been rebuilt, but not on site).
This at least reminded me that I could put a bigger drive into a unit that is actually dead.
Other than that…
Getting a new 1.8″ drive is the hard part. Only two manufacturers make them: Toshiba and Hitachi, and the largest available size is 80GB. I recently bought a Toshiba through newegg.com for my laptop, so they had them at one point.
I agree with Second grade teacher – great article, but please take time to proof read it which will add credibility to the article.
There are plenty of badly written documents on the Internet – Having one that is written well helps a great deal.
Ginger – Its constructive criticism – you, however are not being constructive when you just insult people. Wake up and listen to others once in a while and you might actually learn something.
COOL!
You’re my hero. Definately bookmarking this for when this happens to my ipod…
My ipod same vrison 20 gig crashes when saving position form an podcast” resume playback form a podcast” and some times when playign a song and if i hit it hard enough it starts playing again. Think i’ll change the HD thanks for the instruciton to open it , could’nt find it anywere
Yep, that one’s going straight to my del.icio.us account for safe keeping (as long as Yahoo! holds up their end of the bargain!).
im had the whole broken hard drive/clicking sound problem… sucked i bought a new ipod video but i still have my old ipod if anyone wants it
Hey Chris if you still got that broken ipod id like to mess with it send me an email at gotapinupgirl at yahoo.com.
Cool! Just like that haa…thanks. Also thanks to Laythor.
Quick solution for everyone….stop dropping your IPODS
Great this step by step explanation, simple as replacing a battery on a wristwatch
Tigerdirect has a cable to connect a laptop HD to a regular IDE cable in your PC. THis costs US$9.99 and is a real lifesaver.
Use the URL below or just google “laptop drive adapter” and pick one of the choices.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=244974&Sku=C184-17705&SRCCODE=WEBGOOAUT&CMP=KNC-GOOGL
Nice work. Wonder if it’s possible to find a harddrive with more gig then 20 and the same size of 4th gen tobisha harddrive
That would be like 2k5 awsome.
Huh…my iPod photo had the same problem. All I did was bring it to the nearest Apple Center, w/o my receipt cuz I lost it, and they were more than happy to replace it for me. Got it 2 weeks later. Yes, a brand new 60gb iPod photo, free of charge. They even called me to say that it was ready for pickup. Now that’s good service. I’m from the Philippines by the way, so, I’m not sure if the same goes from other countries.
Next Comments →
{ 22 trackbacks }