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fun with ipod wierdness
Feb. 18th, 2011 05:31 pmfor the past few years i've been using an ipod as my primary music player. in the past year or two, there were a few odd things - random pausing , some songs skipping...
and then itunes froze (unkillably, i'd add) and windows complained of bad clusters in the drive (which was the root cause)
I rather like my ipod, but seriously, how is a programme on a PC FREEZING when something goes wrong on what's effectively a glorified hard drive a acceptable failure mode? The proper thing to do is either gracefully stop the sync, or die like a decent app, not stay in zombie mode.
Anyway, i'm trying to format the drive - linux apparently can do a fat32 format with error/bad cluster checks (windows CLAIMS it did, but didn't), but at the rate things are going, the last 2 million or so sectors will take a month or so (the first few took a few days). Hopefully this may leave a usable system since the issue is bad sectors (AKA old age) not the dreaded clicky hard drive.
Now the reason i'm formatting the drive is this ONE model has a unusual hard drive interface (ce-ata - its ata with a mmc style pinout apparently) as opposed to the standard sata or pata varients, and no one has replacements locally - all other models could have the hard drives replaced.
On the bright side, i've been chatting with a rockbox dev doing an ipod classic port, and HIS ipod has worse bad sector issues than mine, and he might have an alternate solution should the format fail involving some voodoo on the ipod itself i hardly understand.
and then itunes froze (unkillably, i'd add) and windows complained of bad clusters in the drive (which was the root cause)
I rather like my ipod, but seriously, how is a programme on a PC FREEZING when something goes wrong on what's effectively a glorified hard drive a acceptable failure mode? The proper thing to do is either gracefully stop the sync, or die like a decent app, not stay in zombie mode.
Anyway, i'm trying to format the drive - linux apparently can do a fat32 format with error/bad cluster checks (windows CLAIMS it did, but didn't), but at the rate things are going, the last 2 million or so sectors will take a month or so (the first few took a few days). Hopefully this may leave a usable system since the issue is bad sectors (AKA old age) not the dreaded clicky hard drive.
Now the reason i'm formatting the drive is this ONE model has a unusual hard drive interface (ce-ata - its ata with a mmc style pinout apparently) as opposed to the standard sata or pata varients, and no one has replacements locally - all other models could have the hard drives replaced.
On the bright side, i've been chatting with a rockbox dev doing an ipod classic port, and HIS ipod has worse bad sector issues than mine, and he might have an alternate solution should the format fail involving some voodoo on the ipod itself i hardly understand.