lucumr

My brother owns a 5th Generation Video iPod and since some time the iPod was freezing on some songs and I was unable to sync it properly. After about 2 GB transfered data OS X ejected the iPod and sometimes iTunes locked up in a way that the only way to kill iTunes and get working USB ports again was restarting the notebook.

However Graham sent me a link yesterday to some articles where people encountered the same problems. Among some solutions I haven’t tried (like opening the ipod and putting a small pile paper behind the harddisk) there was one that proposed zeroing out the harddisk.

I did that and it didn’t help. However I noticed that the disk ran a lot more silent than before. So I continued that process 7 times over the night and this morning I was able to reload the iPod without a problem. After a complet resync I tried all the songs on the device that made problems before and those pass. Of course now other songs could be broken but beside that it runs a lot faster now I haven’t encountered any “funny harddisk sounds” during the testing.

Definitively worth a try. Don’t give up on iPods that fast :-)