So yeah, this is what happens when you let me grubby little hands get a hold of broken things. I try to fix them and only end up breaking them even more!

This is my brother's old iPod Classic. The 80 GB model. 6th generation. He just gave it to me for nothing since he got an iPhone and therefore had no need for an iPod. He doesn't work on computers like I do (I've taken apart both my laptops and completely disassembled one of them and built my own desktop on top of working on a multitude of other electronics) so he had no desire to fix it. I myself don't need an iPod. I have my Samsung GS4 with a 64 GB SD card, but since it was broken and he was probably going to throw it in the trash anyway, I figured why not ask him if I could see if I could fix it. Who knows?

Now when he showed me that it was broken, he was pretty upset about it. He handed it to me because he knew I'd figure out what was wrong with it. It just turned on and showed a red X with a link at the bottom to Apple's support page. So I turned it off and shook it. It made a clicking noise. Immediately, I knew it was the actuator arm in the hard drive flinging around in there and his hard drive was busted. That's the biggest downside to the Classics. You can't really be very active with them since they don't use flash memory like other models. You'd think that by this time with SD cards that can hold up to 2 TB, we'd have a flash memory based iPod Classic, but I guess they use hard drives to keep costs down.

So when he gave it to me, I got to reading tons and tons of guides on how to pull an iPod apart. Apple designs these things so that no part is user replaceable. Understandable, but not cool for the end user when something needs to be replaced. Maybe they do it like that so people don't try to fix the things themselves and try to get refunds for things they broke themselves. That's one possibility. I tend to lean toward the idea that they make these things so hard to open so you just throw out the old one and go buy a new one. So after figuring out where the clips are, I grabbed a putty knife and a precision screwdriver and proceeded to attempt to release the clips.

Well, now, not only is the hard drive still broken, but the screen is cracked and the back casing is bent to hell. Oops?

Oh well, breaking things is all a part of the learning process! It made my project a little more expensive, but I guess you can't win them all lol

This is what I want to eventually do:

1. Now that the back case is bent out of shape, I want to buy a new one. At least the new one isn't going to have 4 years of scratches. ($10)

2. Since I'm replacing the back case, why not go ahead and replace the front faceplate as well? ($10)

3. Can't have an iPod without a screen. Unless it's a Shuffle. Found one for about $15

4. This is the big one-swap the hard drive for flash memory. ($35)

On #4, I found a guy who makes CF adapters for the ZIF drives that these things use. On top of that, he makes an adapter that you plug into CF that will let you use an SD card. I have a spare 32 GB SD card doing nothing since I upgraded the one in my Android to 64 GB. I don't plan on putting videos on the iPod since the screen resolution is awful on the things (though they weren't bad by the standards in 2009) so 32 gigs should be enough for my library, even if I'm using a lot of lossless audio. I dont' mind not having 80 gigs because an SD card won't have the latency of the hard drive and it's shockproof. Among other things. It'd be cheaper to buy a hard drive, but flash has so many advantages over the hard drive that I think it'd be better. My only question is that I don't know if an iPod can use an SD card that way. A new hard drive would be a guarantee that it'll work. But I'm not sure if an SD card would at this point.

Last note: It may be a while until this thing is actually up and running again. I have an oil leak on my car that I need to have fixed. It's pretty bad. And who knows what it'll cost to have it fixed too? And I need my car. So that comes first. Meh...