A fix for the sad ipod icon problem!
Monday September 11, 2006 - Permanent link to this post -
Man, I feel powerful tonight. I have breathed life into what was dead. I have fixed the broken. I have stared the Grim Tech Reaper in the face and he ran away with his syth between his legs.
Last Thursday morning I took the bus to the train station, all ready for my four hour trip to Brighton and the d.construct conference. I was three Arctic Monkeys tracks into the journey when my ipod just froze. The screen was locked and the controls were completely unresponsive. I tried the hard reset (MENU + SELECT for 6 seconds) and my shiny white music hero began to reboot. Relief overcame me as I watched the LCD light up with the Apple Logo. But then the unimaginable happened. I'd read about it many times in forums, blog posts and fairytales, but I'd never imagined it would ever happen to me. The Sad ipod icon showed it's ugly, 1G, cross-eyed face.
As gutting as it is when tech dies on you, this way more than that. My ipod is my companion when I'm on my own. It's my stereo when I'm at home. I need it. I definitely needed it before my four hour train journey to the south.
So I went the weekend without personal audio. I decided to forget about it until I got home. I drank away my sorrows with Brighton's £4 pints of lager. And then today, well rested and just about recovered from my hangover, I got the opportunity to plug in the ipod and see what I could do.
It wasn't looking good. My Powerbook wouldn't even recognise the ipod. All i had was a little white box that chugged away in cycles of sad icon face and reboot. I've tried for hours tonight to fix it, going through pages of support manuals, forums and blogs and nothing I've found has worked. Finally my frustration got the better of me. I picked up the corpse of my old friend and banged it hard against the table. It was then, just before I threw it against the wall, that I noticed the screen had changed to something I hadn't seen in a while: the menu.
It's fixed. It's actually properly working again. I'm back on listening terms with my old pal and it feels good.
For tha sake of the search engines I'm going to clarify this. If you have a sad ipod icon you can fix it by hitting it hard. I'm not sure if this is the first fix I'd try if ever something like this happened to anything else I own, like my Powerbook, for instance, but it's certainly a viable last resort. It worked for me.
My Nano froze the day after I bought it and without having read about the reset function I was really bricking it that I had bought a dud.
Glad to hear you can fix the sad iPod icon by hitting it hard (c’mon Google work your magic).