I Broke My iPod

In all these years, I’ve never broken an iPod. I’m generally very careful with them, and since I don’t commute to work (I work out of a home office) I don’t carry them around with me much. In fact, I use my main iPod more as a source for my stereo than anything else.

Well, last night, taking my iPod from its dock connected to my stereo to the other side of my office to sync it with my Mac, I slipped, and I dropped the iPod flat on the floor. It did a belly-flop on the wood parquet, and, while there was no visible damage, when I picked it up I could hear a lot of clicking from the hard disk. I moved around the menus, and it was working, but still clicking a lot every time I selected a track. So I restored the iPod, and started recopying all my music to it. It’s a 160 GB model, so that takes quite a while, and I wasn’t able to finish it last night. First thing this morning, I connected it to my Mac, and it started copying again, but it got to a certain point then started copying very slowly, then finally wouldn’t copy any more, making iTunes beachball. Eventually, I got an error message, saying, “Attempting to copy to the disk “Dark Star” failed. The disk could not be read from or written to.”

It looks like it’s over for this one, the first I’ve lost to damage rather than old age. I guess I’ll be getting a new 160 GB iPod in black, since my current one is/was silver. Interestingly, Amazon France (my local Amazon) has iPod classics at about EUR 50 off the regular price of EUR 259: it says they are third generation, but that’s obviously an error, given the product model number, and the graphics. (And anyway, if they were that old, they wouldn’t be 160 GB.)

It’s a shame to lose an iPod. If a replacement hard disk were available here at a reasonable price, I might go that route (that’s what I suggested in my article What to Do with a Dead iPod), but they’re pretty expensive, at least around EUR 150, whereas a new iPod is only EUR 209 from Amazon. Oh well. I’ll try and be more careful next time.