iPod Hard Drive Replacement

Although I only ever dropped my old iPod once, my newer iPod fell on the cement about once a week for a few weeks in a row. I would watch it fall in slow motion, its metallic case gleaming in the sunlight as it twisted and turned. On impact, the protective case would immediately split open plastic falling to the side leaving the iPod free to slide along the pavement scratching the face.

The plastic case that snaps around it kept it free from scratches in my backpack, but was a little too slippery for my uncoordinated hands. Maybe the case saved the iPod from some of the impact of landing on concrete by sacrificially exploding open, but not enough.

On the third or fourth hard landing I picked it up and put the earphones on. It was still playing and I listened to it for probably another fifteen minutes, but then the music stopped. I heard static and was surprised to still hear static when I took the headphones off. Some little part had come loose in the hard drive and as it tried to spin the disc I could hear it scrapping a little groove. My little iPod had decided to grow up and become a DJ scratching analog sounds.

After its aria was played, a red X appeared advising me to visit http://apple.com/support/ipod



So instead I searched for sites on how to replace a hard drive. At first I was thinking of replacing it with a flash disk since there's little hope of my coordination (especially before my morning coffee) will improve, but at the moment that would entail a major shortage in available space. So instead I found a good blog by someone who had experience replacing fifth generation iPod hard drives.

I purchased a replacement size drive on eBay for around $60 and assumed it would come with the wonderful plastic tool that every blog mentions alongside iPod mods. But instead I just got a miniature drive in the mail. So I decided to be resourceful.

Those are Metrocards from the NYC subway. I was collecting them for a friend's art project, but ended up relizing they would work as wedges. I slid them into the long sides of the iPod to release the tabs that hold the iPod together.




As it turned out it took more than one card.



The cards wedged it open enough that I could slide each progressive card further in. Eventually it was wide enough that I could fit an old credit card in and apply a little pressure. Once the gap opened enough I used a micro screw driver to carefully pry the iPod open.

Unplugging the battery is easy, but the ZIF socket on the drive wasn't obvious. The long black (or yellow) tab lifts up towards the ribbon cable and away from the drive. It lays parallel to the ribbon cable and lifts to be perpendicular to the cable.



I was a little concerned at the exposed circuitry on the new drive (1), so I used the plastic separator from the old drive (2) and put a few pieces of electrical tape on it (3). The blue foam separators were still a little sticky so I didn't use any extra adhesive (4).

After that it was just a matter of putting everything back together. Before snapping it back together I plugged it into my laptop. Instead of putting the drive in disk mode I just connected it to iTunes.



iTunes announced that the iPod was in recovery mode, so I clicked the restore button and it went to work. After a minute or so iTunes reported an error. I unplugged the iPod, plugged it in again, and clicked restore again. This time it was successful. After seeing that it was working ok, I disconnected it and snapped the iPod back together. So far it hasn't decided to become a DJ, so things look good.