Resurrection of an iPod classic

05 Feb 2021

It started out as a usual day of lockdown, working on assignments and clearing out old junk from one of the rooms of the house. Most of it was, it was surely surprising the average number of dvds in the common household. What really caught my eye was dad’s iPod Classic in really good shape. Clearly it could power up?

Poor guy had corrupt memory.

First Attempts

With most corrupt memory, I usually try a reformat first in disk utility. What’s to lose? Sadly, this didn’t work. Throwing errors 1430 , 1434 and 1439, all hardware related errors. Holding down select + left puts you in debug mode, also saying the hard drive is there, but not much else.

So can’t format, now what?

Looking around the whole area, I obviously found DankPods for all things iPod classic related. The retro movement has now added the first generations of iPod to vinyl, film cameras and the like. Anyways, the real gem found was iFlash: offering adapters to swap out old HDD for flash memory. It’s as simple as:

1. Get the iFlash module.
2. Replace the hard drive with the iFlash module.
3. Play some of the carpenters.

The only hard thing was popping that case off, a real sharp tool was needed to pry that thing open. Then it was the old switcheroo.

Benefits from this now come to faster access and read-time, which isn’t that recognisable really. What is recognisable is the weight. Syncing the guy also seems to take the same amount of time, personally trying to pull from my own 10+ year memory of the concept of syncing.

Going into About also shows the new size of the memory, which isn’t much as 32Gb was the only I had at the moment. On the flip side, it can be expanded as large as they make ‘em.