iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

On the weekend my iPod had a few write errors, and Wednesday night I thought I’d get around to making a backup of the machine, fearing the inevitable. I added a few music files first and got an error after the first one copied. Then I tried to copy the whole thing ASAP and drive died for good!

After forcing a reboot I was presented with an error icon on the iPod screen: a folder with an exclamation mark (pictured). Not a good sign! I did some diagnosis and mounted in disk mode and tried to scan it for errors…. that didn’t go so well. I made a sound recording of the dead fourth generation iPod trying to spin up, by placing it on my PowerBook’s mic as Disk Warrior was scanning it (pictured left). It’s not a pretty sound.

So today I called Apple and they informed me that since it’s within it’s year of hardware warrantee they would ship out a box for me to ship it back to them. They’ll send a new one once they receive this broken one.

Apparently I’m on the hook for shipping, that is, unless you have Apple Care. So since the iPod has been reset about a 1/2 dozen times, and I got an educational discount, I exercised my option to get an extra year within the first year.

Searching around the net it would appear as though Apple is having some quality control issues with the forth generation iPod. I’m relatively pleased with how things are going so far, but that might have something to do with the fact that I initially paid $90 for a 15GB iPod and it arrived as a 20GB model.

I’ll keep my blog posted about how the repair goes, but my parting message is this: if you can get the Apple Care package for your iPod still it’s probably worth your money (though there’s no reason to do it before the years out 😉 ).

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 3rd, 2005 at 22:23 and is filed under *nix, General, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.