Crazy way to fix an iPod -- but it works

Crazy way to fix an iPod -- but it works!

(The podcast of this blog post will be available soon.)

OK, this tip has nothing to do with PowerPoint or Excel or anything else like that, but it just saved me a few hundred bucks, so I thought I'd share it. Here's the deal:

My iPod had been working fine until -- and this is the weird part -- I transferred an episode of the Twilight Zone onto it from my new Tivo (I wanted to put the file on my office computer to burn the episode onto DVD). It might be the show's most talked-about episode: "Eye of the Beholder", in which Maxine Stewart plays a lady undergoing radical treatment in a hospital, trying to look "normal". Her head is completely bandaged, everyone describes her as hideous, and you don't see anyone's face until her bandages come off...

Maybe Rod Serling's masterpiece was too much for the poor, old iPod (or maybe it was the 1.5 GB size of the video files!), because it became very ill. It would work only intermittently, display the infamous sad-face and exclamation mark icons, and one day it just stopped working altogether, uttering a final, sickening chirp. The drive would click, but not much else would happen. People all over the Web described the condition as the Click of Death, where you face the unpleasant choice of replacing the hard drive or chucking the whole iPod in the recycle bin and buying a new one.

Did I mention my PC wouldn't recognize the iPod either? When I tried to view the Disk Management window in the Computer Management console (press + R, typecompmgmt.msc /s then press Enter), the screen would freeze.

If your 4G or 5G iPod (has the gray, non-moving click wheel) stops working, the first thing you should do is reset it: hold the Menu and Select buttons for a few seconds until the Apple logo appears. If that doesn't get it working, reset it again, then immediately hold the Rewind and Fast Forward buttons to bring it into Drive mode. Then reset it again.

If that fails, use Diagnostic mode to run some hardware tests. Reset your iPod again, then hold the Rewind and Select buttons until the Diagnostic menu appears. Then navigate by pressing the Rewind and Fast Forward buttons and click the Select button to choose the tests to run. You can test its memory, screen, hard drive, connections and lots more.

So are you ready for the really crazy part? Here goes: I was running the hard drive scan, which should have taken several minutes, but was taking over 40 minutes. So I took a tip from Macslash.org and knocked each of the 4 corners of the iPod on the desk, about as hard as I'd knock on someone's front door. And the bloody thing sprang to life! The menus came back and when I connected it to my computer's USB port, Windows recognized the hard drive and iTunes sprang up and showed everything on the unit as though nothing was ever amiss. I was even able to cut and paste the Twilight Zone episode onto my hard drive.

I have to assume there was a loose connection somewhere. I was considering opening the case, using the instructions on the iPodlounge forum, but didn't have a guitar pick handy.

Some people on Macslash said they've even wrapped their iPods in a washcloth and slammed them backside-down onto the desk to get them working. I'll save that act of desperation if the 4-corner knock trick doesn't work.