Fruity Fixing

I received a message today requesting my services as someone who is good with gadgets to try and fix an iPod nano. As I read the message, I saw that small i and knew I was in for a hard time. These things - the nano in particular - are troublesome little blighters. They are sealed units which prevents you fixing any internal problems and they are made by Apple which means you have to use iTunes to put songs on them. If iTunes is the problem then you are stuffed and you have a very expensive memory stick with a screen.

In this case, iTunes did at first appear to be the problem. It refused to recognise the iPod meaning you couldn't put songs onto it. Windows was quite happy with it and things showed up fine. Flash memory is quite resilient as it has no moving parts so that this was still functioning to some degree was a good sign.

I had assumed that there would be a reset button on the device to restore the manufacturers settings in case they were changed but no sign of that either. I went through the laborious task of reinstalling iTunes on such an old machine which didn't work either and I was coming to the end of my list of things to try when I plumped for a restart. Windows decided that it needed to check the iPod disk for consistency (as it does sometimes) and I wasn't expecting anything else from this other than a check for a couple of minutes. As luck would have it, it began to find bad sectors - and quite a lot of corrupt data which it then proceed to attempt to fix. After about twenty minutes of this, it eventually finished and it now works! I would never have considered running a chkdsk on it but I will certainly remember that for the future.

The gadget that was heading for the bin has been brought back from the dead and has saved its owners a lot of money on a replacement. Harking back to this post, my payment is a trip to the cinema with ice-cream. Sadly I am not in Birmingham for the next two Wednesday's and so we will either have to go on a different day of the week - shock horror! - or wait a couple of weeks for my last week in Birmingham before my return to Sheffield. Just as I thought time had slowed down a little, I get a stark reminder that the summer is nearly over.