JEFF WILSON.dev

July 14, 2009

iPod 4G Repair

I was able to successfully resurrect my wife’s iPod 4G (20 GB) that suffered from a hard drive death recently. I used the opportunity to convert the iPod to use CompactFlash memory as well as replacing the old battery with a fresh one. The flash memory should make the iPod more reliable since there are no moving parts. Lower power consumption (and therefore longer battery life) is also a benefit. I dropped down to 16 GB from the original 20 GB hard drive, but that is still plenty enough to hold my wife’s music library. Many folks would probably just buy a more recent iPod, but I was compelled to fix the 4G because we have MusicLink 1.0 in our Honda, which can only charge 4G (and some earlier) iPods. We have a similar issue with a kitchen radio/iPod dock. All told, I spent around $80 on parts.

I used the following guide, but also referred to several other sites in selecting the components:

Instructables Article on iPod CompactFlash Conversion

The trickiest part appears to be selecting an appropriate CompactFlash card. You must use a card that supports IDE mode. Many cards only support a different mode used by cameras. Unfortunately, most CF cards don’t specify IDE compatibility and those that do are generally quite expensive (targeting embedded computer markets for system critical applications). Apparently, many brands will use whatever memory and controller chips are cheapest at any given time, which may or may not include the IDE capability. It initially appeared that any consumer-grade CompactFlash card I purchased would be a crapshoot for IDE compatibility. After lots of reading, I finally found that Transcend was a good brand and their official documentation even seemed to indicate IDE as officially supported. I ended up purchasing the following for around $50: Transcend 16GB Compact Flash (CF) Flash Card Model TS16GCF133 (dead link removed, see below)

As for a CompactFlash to IDE adapter, I purchased the following:

DealExtreme CF-to-IDE

This adapter was far cheaper than any other option I could find, but took ages to ship due to backorder and even then took a while to get to me from Hong Kong. Given the roughly $5 cost, it was still worth it though. When it arrived, I found a few pins bent and very sloppy soldering. Also, the slave/master jumper needed to be bent parallel to the board because it sticks up too high (this is discussed on various forums). After fixing these problems, the iPod repair was otherwise very straightforward.

I purchased the battery from here:

iPod Battery (dead link removed, see below)

Once I connected everything, doing an iPod restore via iTunes and then a synch to download the music brought the iPod back to life.

Editor’s note: Original link no longer resolves; updated to an archived copy from the Wayback Machine.