ipod fault-software or hardware

Posted by: Bruce Woodhouse on 04 February 2006

My 18 month old iPod 40Gb is becoming erratic. The clickwheel first started to only work on about half of the arc. Now once switched on it is 50:50 if the clickwheel is going to work at all.

I've done a software update, and reset the device several times which briefly restores function but after a whle it all goes wrong again.

Is this hardware (the clickwheel still allows menu/fwd etc commands just no scrolling) or software. Any ideas?

The Apple website help I found fairly unhelpful.

Bruce

Posted on: 04 February 2006 by Diode100

Have you tried the question and answer on iLounge. You register, send in your question and once a week they post all the responses. I found them very knowledgable and helpful.

Posted on: 04 February 2006 by Squonk

Bruce,

When my ipod went peculiar and became erratic I decided to wipe the whole thing clean and start again - it is called a restore. It erases everything including the songs and restores ipod settings to their original state. Like you I had tried resets but this did not work.

This fixed the thing completely.It took a couple of hours to then reload the songs and all was back to normal.

Instructions for this are in the manual. May be worth a try.

Adrian

Posted on: 04 February 2006 by Bruce Woodhouse

Looking worse than I feared. The 'sad iPod' icon has made an appearance, and now I cannot switch the device into disk mode or even get it to be identified by the PC (to do a restore). Thanks for the ilounge tip. I'll see if I can find a way of 'restoring' from this situation.

Bruce

Posted on: 04 February 2006 by garyi

Um, I would say thats bad news Bruce.

Sometimes you can plug them in and do a reset, this sometimes helps.

Posted on: 05 February 2006 by Steve G

Plugging into the mains recharger and trying a reset can sometimes fix this, although you might have to try several times. My wife's iPod Mini did something similar and it took a while to get it to respond after which a firmware update seems to have resolved the problem.