iPod Reset

Resetting iPod if it appears frozen or doesn’t respond. Arrghh. Somehow my 4G iPod Photo just doesn’t like my Windows machine anymore. It sure feels like a driver error somewhere. Basically what happens is that on loading, I often times don’t get to iTunes and then the iPod hangs on the don’t disconnect message.

Resetting the iPod seems to help some. Remember for most modern ipods, you reset them by:

# Toggle the hold switch on and off
# Press and hold the Menu and Select buttons until the Apple logo appears. Usually 6-10 seconds
# Rinse and repeat until it does it

The Apples diagnostics aren’t particularly helpful. Basically, its the standard, uninstall itunes and ipod, reinstall, pray and repeat. Or try a different USB port, blah, blah.

This one really feels like there is some sort of disk error. Since the iPod is just a USB hard drive as far as Windows is concerned, you can actually check disk it (to to iTunes and enable the iPod for disk use).

Then start the disk defragmenter at Start/Programs/Accessories/System Tools/Disk Defragmenter. Now, Apple doesn’t recommend this for some reason, but I’ve tried it and as long as everything is backed up it only make sense to me that a really full iPod (my 40GB has only 4% free) is going to be heavily fragmented). There are some sites that say skipping you sometime hear on an iPod is related to this.

Certainly, commonsense says battery life is going to be. Having the disk whirring all the time has got to have an impact.