Forums | MacLife

That makes me wonder, after D'Eyncourt's problems, if it is possible to enable disk use on an iPod and thus use DiskUtility in order to check the status of the internal hard drive.  A bad sector would cause any number of problems, including misreading files resulting in the restart issue (sound familiar?)

As for repartitioning, try reformatting the iPod through iTunes.  It should perform a disk check and assign skips for any damaged sectors.  Furthermore, if this is still under warranty, you should definitely have it replaced.  OTOH, I don't know if an iPod firmware allows a complete reformat.  I've never dug into it, but I wouldn't be surprised it the drive actually sports two partitions, one for its firmware, and the mountable drive for data.

djsven wrote:

Unfortunately, the iPod is well out of warranty. So it's either fork over 230 bucks for a replacement, or try to fix it.

Leaving the money aside, I really would like to get it working. I've spent hours figuring out the problem, and it seems like it should be doable. I don't need anywhere near 160GB, so I should be able to avoid the bad parts. I don't really agree with the 'throw it out and buy a new one' attitude, you know?

I absolutely agree.  My current iPod of choice is a 5th gen iPod Video 30GB.  When I finally get my fingers around a new nano, the other will probably be sold.

I have determined those are the bad sectors using chkdsk (and some other programs that I forget), plus by manually reading from the drive using dd.

I'm 95% certain the problem is that the iPod is unable to read the iTunesControl file (because it is unreadable) and therefore can't start up. (The iPod works perfectly fine in disk mode).

Does the iPod react at all to being connected to a computer, and when it does, does the computer correctly recognize the device?

Jokotai wrote:

Does the iPod react at all to being connected to a computer, and when it does, does the computer correctly recognize the device?

In disk mode, yes. iTunes recognizes it, I can add music to it, play songs from it, run chkdsk, etc.

Not in disk mode, it gets hung up on the apple screen and either freezes or reboots. At no point will it ever be recognized by a computer.

Update: After trying many things, instead of continuously rebooting, it will now occasionally start up, and I can access all of the menus. As soon as I plug in the usb cord, it reboots. It still functions fine in disk mode.

When I tried opening up some games, it make the clicking noise and gave an error about the game not being able to load. As such, I'm now 99.5% that the firmware is indeed stored on the hard drive (and is somewhere where there are bad sectors).

Here's what's confusing: Where is it? I've manually looked at the drive (over and over) using a hex editor, and there isn't enough space for the firmware before the one FAT32 partition starts. So it has to be on that partition. But then it must be in one or more files.

I originally thought it must be in the iTunesControl file, since it is around 152MB. But when I looked at that file, it's full of zeroes! 152MB worth of them. I guess this could be part of the problem, but that would be more plausible if the file had some information in it, especially since it did successfully boot up a few times.