Mac Geekery

I had a 15gb which appeared to have bad blocks (would crap out copying stuff over at around 4gb), and I repartitioned it with a 5gb firmware partition to skip over the bad blocks. A 9gb iPod worked for some time, but then started crapping out. Replaced w/ 20gb and no dice, returned it, next 20gb didn’t work either — and I accidentally pulled out the HD cable from the board.

Long story short (ok, well, not really), it was a pain to get the Ziff connector back in, but once I did finally get it, my 20gb and 15gb worked fine. (Well, abridged version — I actually had to do a lot of diskmode, format, restore dancing to finally get the iPod to reset and suddenly it worked.)

Anyway, two fixes from this site — the large firware partition from yr “partitioning the ipod” article (tho seemingly unnecessary for me, it might help someone else), and reseating the HD cable from this article.

Thanks! Now I have a backup 15gb drive for when the 20gb craps out.