Almost managed to brick my iPod Nano?

[Matti]

Hi!

I decided to test Rockbox with my 1st gen iPod Nano. Smooth installation and everything seemed to work well. Battery charge was 83% when I decided to plug the player to an USB port and test the OGG support.

When I plugged the iPod to the USB port, the screen first displayed the "Do not disconnect." message for about two, three seconds, but then the screen went blank and my PC wasn't able to see the device any more. It seemed like the battery had died suddenly. I tried to reset the iPod, tried to charge it over-night, read the forums and tried to search for tips and tricks to get my player back to life. No help.

Today I decided to dissect the Nano and see if the battery actually died at the plug-in phase. Voltmeter showed 4.1 volts. And when I tried to charge the iPod, the voltmeter showed 4.7 volts.

So, the Nano wasn't responding to any reset / disk mode / beating / kicking / praying / begging attempts I found from the net (and from this forum). I decided that I'll just short-circuit the battery and see if this "hard reset" has any effect. yes, I know, it's stupid to do that, but shorting the battery for one second won't do much harm at this point anyway.

Well, the shorting worked. The battery took quite a hit and voltage was only 0.6 V after the shorting, but immediately when I plugged the player to the PC, the screen came back to life and displayed the familiar Rockbox screen. The player apparently reset itself at the short-circuit and was displaying 00:00 time. From this evidence I assume that it has lost all other settings as well (haven't checked yet, I'll just let it to recharge itself completely now).

So, the question is, is there any other way to do the real hard reset except either shorting the battery or cutting the wires? Also, is there any guesses, why this total lock-up happened in the first place?

Oh, by the way, I don't recommend shorting the battery. It can't be healthy for it.

[bascule]

So, the question is, is there any other way to do the real hard reset except either shorting the battery or cutting the wires? Also, is there any guesses, why this total lock-up happened in the first place?

Oh, by the way, I don't recommend shorting the battery. It can't be healthy for it.

The reset procedure always (to everyone's knowledge on this board) works, if done correctly.

It is seriously hazardous to short out any battery and this should never be attempted.

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=11612.0
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=8546.0
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=12124.0

[Matti]

So, the question is, is there any other way to do the real hard reset except either shorting the battery or cutting the wires? Also, is there any guesses, why this total lock-up happened in the first place?

Oh, by the way, I don't recommend shorting the battery. It can't be healthy for it.

The reset procedure always (to everyone's knowledge on this board) works, if done correctly.

It is seriously hazardous to short out any battery and this should never be attempted.

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=11612.0
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=8546.0
http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php?topic=12124.0

You mentioned that the reset procedure should always work. But is the reset just another software operation? Or does it really send a reset signal to the processor without routing through any kind of routine? Compare this to a 8086 PC: Ctrl+Alt+Del / reset pin of the microprocessor, which as far as I can remember, was just a grounding a pin at the processor, which would set the processor to the boot-up state.

I'm curious because before trying to do anything radical, I already had read the forum posts about buggy Nano reset, which would take more than 10 or 30 seconds to reset the thing (especially the first link, you mention, is familiar to me). I clocked three minutes and still wasn't able to get any kind of life-signs out of the device.