Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

thebends

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 8, 2009
14
0
So, I have the classic for over a year. And it worked fined until last month. I'm listening to songs and all of a sudden the track will either completely stop or stop and replay. I have tried shutting it down and rebooting. sometimes it works other times not. Any help on this would be great. I hope I don't need to go back to factory settings and wipe everything out.
 
Sounds like a usual case of a bad/failing hard drive. It happens.

You can check by reseting the ipod by holding menu and the center button, then immediately after it resets shift to holding the previous/rewind button with the center button. Then you can press menu for Manual Test, then select IO > HardDrive > HDSMARTData to get the stats of the drive.

What you're looking for is the amount of reallocated sectors and pending sectors. Usually if the number of either is high, it's a failing drive. Especially pending sectors. You can have some number of reallocs and be ok. But pending with reallocs usually means it's going south.

The good news is that the drive is replaceable and upgradable. :)
See: https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/iPod+Classic+Hard+Drive+Replacement/564

It's not easy to get into it, but I used a couple opening tools and swapped an 80GB drive in a classic to a 120GB drive. And I'm in the proccess of changing out an old 80GB drive to a 64GB CF card to prevent hard drive issues in the future on an older iPod video. So you have some options.

Here's the output of the iPod classic I replaced the drive in.
Bad:
cPpFEDJl.jpg

New drive:
YNBGMI1l.jpg
 
Last edited:
Yes. I love the classic as an idea and as a product, but the one flaw in that particular design was the tendency to experience HDD failure on some models.

Twice I had iPod classic HDD failures, which - fortunately - happened while each of the two devices were still under warranty, and thus, they were each replaced without any difficulty.

However, it is clear that this is still an issue with a certain consistent (if small) percentage of the classics manufactured. It is the reason why I, personally, would love to see a classic produced in the more stable - and durable - SSD drive of the Touch.

Having said that, I also have had classics that have run flawlessly for several years without any problems.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.