My iPod is broken. This is especially sad since it is the first iPod I have ever owned and was a gift from my wife. It was also purchased by my friend Christo at the Apple store in San Francisco which, as any Apple aficionado will tell you, is the shit – as Apple stores go.
At first my 60 gigabyte iPod photo gave the ‘sad iPod’ icon when I tried to start it up: 
According to the Apple support site for iPods, you should try to force the iPod into disk mode if that happens. From the Apple site:
- Before manually placing the iPod into Disk Mode you should verify that it has a charge, if not you need to either charge iPod before continuing or connect it to power. You can either connect it to a high-powered USB port, or plug the iPod Power Adapter into an electrical outlet and connect iPod to the power adapter.
- Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
- Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons for at least 6 seconds until the Apple logo appears.
- When the Apple logo appears, release the Menu and Select buttons and immediately press and hold the Select and the Play/Pause buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears.
- Disconnect iPod from the power adapter and connect it to your computer; the screen on the iPod will change and say “Do not disconnect”
Once you have done that you can use iTunes to reset the iPod. It took me many attempts before I finally forced my iPod into disk mode. I then connected it to my Powerbook and reset the pod. Halfway through syncing it with my library again, however, I got an error indicating that copying to the iPod had failed.
I guess the disk is moer-toe (fried). *sigh*
I shall have to take it to Apple and hope that it can be repaired without much cost. Given the prices of iPods I probably won’t be replacing it. The huge tag just doesn’t seem to justify the purchase of something which breaks so easily. Besides, I have nappies to buy and houses to pay off.
I am going to have to find an alternative method for listening to podcasts in my car for the time being, which sucks. It’s amazing how something so small and simple becomes an integral part of your life. I can’t really survive without a media player of some sort – and I sure as hell am not going to be listening to music radio in South Africa.