Sunday 4 March 2012

Broken things: iPod Classic

Somebody brought me an iPod with the timeless White Screen Of Death. That used to be pretty common and is easily fixed by reloading the firmware.

It worked, I turned it on, and things got a bit weird.



Somewhere along the way, about half the letters in every bit of text in the firmware vanished. Some shorter words had the misfortune to disappear altogether.




I have no idea why this happened. The firmware copy was fine, the loading process was fine, and if it was general corruption we'd be seeing a lot more than just missing letters.

Sadly, reloading the same firmware a second time gave me a perfectly-working iPod. Sometimes things are more fun half-broken than working.

2 comments:

  1. this is what i have with my ipod classic 80gb, newer one :S is it the lcd screen?

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    Replies
    1. It's just the software. If you plug it into your computer and reinstall it using itunes, you should have a perfectly working ipod again.

      For more information, the apple support site has a quick guide: http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/five_rs/classic/

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