My 4G 40GB (monochrome) iPod seems to be having trouble spinning up. I had "fixed it" by restoring it, but now it won't mount again and I think it has pretty much hit the dust.
Luckily I chose to buy extended Applecare after I got it replaced the first time - it had a similar hard drive problem where it displayed a sad iPod. Here's a informative comment I found here:
For Christmas 2004 both of my daughters received iPod's from Santa, one U2 20Gb iPod and a regular white 20Gb. The white ipod has been returned twice to Apple under warranty and the U2 iPod once , although it has just failed again as I write this note and needs to go back. In each case the folder and exclamation mark were on the screen. This is a fatal error 90% of the time it happens. Both girls swear they did not drop their iPods.
Apple may have a quality problem with their hard drive supplier for the gen 4 iPods or it may be that shipping or how you use your iPod is causing a problem.
I've been in the data storage industry for 15 years working for a number of hard drive manufacturers in that time and I recognize the sounds that a drive makes when it has crashed or has a stiction problem. Stiction is a situation where the drives heads are "stuck" to the surface of the disk and the motor torque is unable to free them. In some drives additional current is used to pulse the spindle motor to "free" the heads when the firmware detects that the drive is not up to speed. This pulsing can sometimes have the unwanted effect of ripping the heads straight off the suspension arms if they are well stuck. Stiction is a problem you never ever want in a hard drive and is always a design problem, it's never anything an end user can cause.
Head crashes can be caused by stiction but are often caused by mishandling of the unit during manufacture or during normal use, even when powered off. An excessive shock can generate "head slaps" which is where the head gouges in to the surface of the disk creating small abrasive particles that can later on cause the head to crash in a pretty fatal and permanent manner (never buy a hard drive from a store where they have them stacked on top of each other, unless they are in their boxes, you're buying a time bomb).
A stiction situation can sound like the drive is straining to power up and never quite gets there. A head crash or damaged head usually sounds like the drive attempts to spin up but when the head/actuator assembly releases and tries to come ready it cannot and a "chattering" noise is heard followed immediately by spin down.
Having performed failure analysis on many hard drives over the years, one of the first things you do is to listen to the drive trying to power up and come ready to listen for the things I outlined previously.
The next time you see the dreaded file and exclamation mark listen to your iPod, my descriptions may give you a clue as to what's going on. If the sounds are different then you may get lucky and a reset procedure may get you back and running.
Hard drives are incredibly fragile devices and even a gentle knock when it's playing can cause damage that will not show up immediately. Most hard drive problems can show up several weeks after the event that led to it took place.So be careful when you're using them while your exercising, if the music skips it's a good indication that you're causing out of spec shock levels to the drive which potentially may cause latent damage that could ruin your day in the near future.
When my daughter's iPod's bit the dust, I listened to them, one met the description for stiction and the other three for crashes.
First one was a crashed head, this one seems to be stiction. edit: Just after I submitted this post, I spun my iPod on its back and freed its heads or something, and enabled it to spin up. So it's working at the moment.
Anyhow, I'm wondering if there's any chance that, if I wait a month or so, I could get either an iPod photo or video as my replacement instead of another ho-hum 40GB monochrome iPod. This possibility only has entered my mind because people were getting upgraded iBook a while back.
Has anyone gotten anything other than a 4G or 3G under an Applecare replacement?
-Nate
