Yesterday, as I was leaving work, I plugged the 4th gen iPod on the car, set it to random and started driving. 10 minutes later, I noticed it was skipping some songs. I’ve seen it happen before (a long time ago) and was lucky enough to:

a) have it within the warranty period
b) have the fellow who brought it from San Francisco make the same business trip in a week

The folks at the Apple Store asked no questions and traded the malfunctioning iPod for a brand new (and shiny) one. I also got a Applecare warranty extension for two more years. Needless to say, Apple representatives in Portugal would deny assistance to the iPod with Applecare as they didn’t accept to repair the iPod inside the warranty period. Y’all know the drill with Apple and Portugal, right? But any other Apple store would accept it. A-N-Y.

Back to today. The iPod was left charging overnight and plugged back in to the computer today to confirm the thesis that the disk was screwed up. Windows didn’t recognize it, Ubuntu didn’t (but the /var/log/messages output is slighty more helpful than its Windows counterpart - which is none). A few seconds later, I was greeted with a constant clicking noise coming from the inside of the iPod. And then it reset. And then it made a face at me. Disk failure. No chance of running the diagnostics. No chance of resetting it. A sad iPod icon begging to be taken to the Apple support site.

The Apple support site doesn’t help at all. Last time it happened to me, I was able to put the iPod in disk mode but unable to make it recognizable by the operating system. Next suggestion: open a support call. Yeah right. As if it was possible in Portugal. By this time, it hit me: I had roughly 10 gigs of pictures on the iPod, absolutely no backups (I was waiting to classify them, tag them and burn them to DVD). I started to panic. Even if I got the warranty thing fixed, they wouldn’t recover what was on the disk.

First thing I thought about was professional data recovery. I gave up after visiting a few websites when I understood it could cost me around 500 euro to recover 10 gigs of data from a malfunctioning hard-disk. My photos are my memories, my memories are priceless indeed, so I was slowly willing to forget a little of the previous 3 months and use the money to buy another non-Apple MP3 player.

Second approach: I remembered something about sticking hard-drives in the freezer for a few hours and then using a very small time-window to reconnect them and copy the data to a safe place. A lot has been said about this method, and even if it sounds strange little scientific, haven’t seen any relevant reports of people claiming it doesn’t work. Some people say the disks remain alive for enough time to copy the data, some say the disk resurrect from the dead and work like a charm from then on. I wondered how many so-called data recovery companies do this on a regular basis and charge a bunch of money for it. Decided to give it a go at home, as it wouldn’t hurt to try.

Third approach: I was beginning to feel a little like the iPod icon: sad, so I challenged google images with something like “sad ipod icon” so I could have a IM buddy icon matching my mood (instead of yet another lolcat). The first hit was Tom Coffee’s website (Spilling Coffee) which described a very unusual and unorthodox method of recovering a dead iPod. He mumbles a little about Apple’s official advices on reanimating dead iPods a.k.a. the 5 R’s: Reset, Retry, Restart, Reinstall, Restore and then introduces a new “R” on the equation. Let me quote him:

I had a broken iPod that was resistent to all the usual methods of repair. If I couldn’t get it fixed I was going to have to send it into Apple. So I decided to do what many of the blogs out there recommended:

Purposely drop my iPod to the floor.

This had worked for many, many other people even though Apple’s website (wisely) doesn’t mention this possible fix. I couldn’t quite bring myself to dropping my $300 iPod to the hard tile floor on the off chance that it would spin or wobble on the way down so I did the next best thing: I held it and slammed it onto a pad of paper on my desk (providing some cushion so I didn’t crack the case), charging port down.

And like mana falling from heaven, the tunes started playing.

Apparently there are really SIX R’s in the Apple repair repetoir: Reset, Retry, Restart, Reinstall, Restore and Ram.

This is a ridiculous method but it works. Tom is earning a little extra money selling recovery kits. I had no time to order mine and dog knows it would probably get stuck in customs or lost in the mail. So I hit it. And the sad face disappeared.

Yes, banging my iPod against a ADSL technical paper brought it back to life.

I’ve lost all my faith in technology. But I’ve recovered 4897 photos and I’m burning them to DVD as we speak…