Forums | MacLife

By reloading do you mean bringing it back to factory settings. If not then connect to your mac, open iTunes and back up you iPod, then bring it back to factory settings and afterwards upgrade to the most recent  version.

When your'e back post your results and if it worked don't forget to thank me.

::calls for other members::

There is no power button in that sense.

gd wrote:

Check the pause button on the click wheel. It could be the problem.

I do have my iPod classic in a rather tight carrying case, but it is one such that the click wheel is uncovered. The pause on click wheel acts normally otherwise--I can pause and start up what I am playing without any problems.

I will note that the restarts can happen when my iPod is face up or face down sitting on my desk at work beside me (but not connected to my work computer). It also can reset while in my pocket as I am walking. Except for the timing when it restarts within seconds of starting a new podcast (my usual practice--I do listen to music but it is mostly for listening to podcasts) there doesn't seem to be any common situation linking them together.

Maybe I have a buggy iPod, perhaps with fault flash RAM? Any way for testing this?

boot your iPod into it's diagnostic mode.  Make sure that the hold is not on, and while on the main screen, hold down menu and select at the same time for about 6 seconds, until the screen goes black.  The iPod will reboot.  While the apple is being displayed on the screen, hold down previous and select at the same time.  The Diagnostics menu will display, telling you to hit Menu for manual tests or Select for auto test.  I highly recommend using the manual test mode as the auto test can take a while (and I think it skips some steps).  Then you will have a menu of every diagnostic you could think of.  Scroll down to Memory and run both SDRAM and Flash tests, and then run the Power A2D test.  When you're done, exit back out via the Reset option.

While you're at it, if any of those buttons feels sluggish, then you definitely have a button sticking which can cause the iPod to restart intermittantly.  I would also suspect your battery, since even while the iPod is plugged up to a power source, the power is still being drawn through the battery while it is operating.

A word of warning that the diagnostics mode will drain the crap out of a battery.  Just going over these steps for myself so I could write this took my battery from nearly full to dead.  I've also heard that the diagnostics mode won't even start up if the iPod is anything less than 50% charged.

Good luck.

Wow, Jokotai--thanks a lot! I fully agree with mrreet2001: please sticky Jokotai's post.

On my iPod classic I ran many of the tests except the SDRAM test and it passed them without noting any problems. The SDRAM test requires a connection to power--the test will not continue without it--which I cannot do at the moment, but I shall do so when I get home and report here any problems found.

During my checking the diagnostic screens I did not note any sluggishness in cursor movement.

I don't think that the battery is the problem. I never have had any problems with charging and the few times I have my iPod restart while I was watching it there was no message about low battery charge or such.

Jokotai wrote:

Thanks for the wootage.  I'm happy to be able to show you something.  Sorry that I missed the fact that the SDRAM test requires external power.

Another head-slapping idea that I should have suggested first: reset the iPod's software via iTunes.  This is the iPod equivalent to a fresh OS installation, and fixes some intermittant problems.  A word of warning, though, that this will effectively format the whole iPod, so if you've managed to pack that 160GB bad boy up, be prepared to spend a long time syncing after you reset it.

I have done exactly that with no change in the problem (and, yes, it took a long time to re-sync).

Unfortunately there was an unexpected problem when I tried to run the SDRAM test: the message said "FW required" which I assumed was an old, old message from back in the FireWire days. Nope, apparently it does literally mean that the test requires a FireWire connection. A bit hard to do when all we get is a USB cable, right?

I did find some other pages which suggested a "temporary" fix. Apparently there was some problem with the album art for the music files and you could stop the restart problem by setting iTunes to NOT download the album art. Well, that was true for iTunes 8.x but there is no such option for iTunes 9 which I downloaded and installed last night.

I'm at home and tried an experiment: I set iTunes 9 to only load podcasts to my iPod classic and see if I could get the reset problem to happen: so far 88 minutes of podcasts with no resets. Next I shall load my music and other files and see if perhsps iTunes 9 has fixed the problem

It seems that Apple has fixed the album art problem with iTunes 9--I no longer am having the reset problem, or at least it is no longer as predictable as it once was. I was able to play through several podcasts in order with nary a restart even after I re-loaded my music and other files. I did note that when I installed iTunes 9 it take a long time shuffling through my current files so perhaps there was something that was snipping out the problematic album art among other things.

For a while the problem seemed to go away (and it still isn't much of a problem when I am playing a playlist), but now it's back with the same predictableness. I play one podcast, then if I select another podcast that isn't the next one on the list being played, I can get my iPod classic to restart fairly consistently.

Jokotai wrote:

If you can demonstrate the problem consistently, take it up to a Genius bar and show them.  The fact that all of your diagnostics come clean and you've reset the iPod should resolve any software or hardware problems.  You might just walk away with a free replacement.

I'll give it a try but it is unexplained why the problem largely went away for a while when I installed iTunes 9.

Just now as I typed the above, I seem to have a new problem: at unpredictable times my iPod will be playing one podcast then suddenly will start playing the next podcast if there is one in the current list or stop playing if there isn't a next one. There is no reset associated with this problem. I pressed down on my carrying case around the Forward button on the wheel to see if it is applying some pressure on the wheel at that point, but it did not forward the current play.

Jokotai wrote:

That happens to me sometimes when the downloaded file is corrupted.  It will corrupt sometimes while being synced to the iPod, hence only the iPod will have the corrupt header and stop mid-playback.  This is more common for manually imported music.  Remove the podcast (uncheck it), sync, and then re-add the podcast, and sync again.  This usually fixes that problem.  You can rule this out by trying to play the podcast again and see if it stops at the same point.

Thanks for the advice but I am quite certain that the problems are NOT in the files. I always can play through any of the "problem" files, and the stopping points within a given file are completely at random. I haven't checked their playability on iTunes itself.

Just for completeness I'm going to do a final restoration using my newly downloaded iTunes 9.0.1 and see if any problems get fixed. I'll do a Disk Utility scan of my iPod before downloading anything to it.

To minimize any problems due to cover art or such, I have loaded only a select number of podcasts. So far I have had my iPod classic suddenly skip forward to the next podcast in that particular list. Going back to the previous podcast I found that that particular program was at the 0:00 mark, so it was as if the Forward button had been pressed (it hadn't--it was just sitting on my desk with no pressure on the front).

Waiting until Sunday because that was the soonest time for an appointment for me.