So, a while ago, I attached my iPod to my PC to throw some new music onto it. I'm a Linux user, and on my iPod I've been using Rockbox ever since I got it, a little over three years ago.
In my logs, I noticed that something weird was going on: I saw occasional I/O and FAT errors popping up. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me to write them down or save them, but there were two numbers in there that always recurred; I figured two sectors were damaged, or something.
Then, I noticed that I couldn't put any new music on it. The copying would always fail. Other than that it still worked fine though, so I didn't pay much attention to it and I thought I'd take a look at this problem some other time.
Eventually, however, it crashed pretty badly. It would no longer boot, not even respond to the reset button combination (MENU+SELECT). When I attached it to my PC it would constantly power up and reboot, in an endless loop.
With some help from the people in #rockbox, I managed to get it to boot into disk mode yesterday, and let it recharge. Now I can get it to boot into the old firmware, as well. When I attempt to boot it into rockbox, I get the dreaded "Error! Can't load rockbox.ipod: File not found" message.
Today, I decided to take a closer look at this mess. I let it boot into disk mode and attached it to my PC. Then I did this:
[sander@arch ~]$ sudo mount -t vfat /dev/sde2 /mnt/temp
[sander@arch ~]$ cd /mnt/temp/
[sander@arch temp]$ ls -Alh
totaal 4,0K
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 jan 15 2004 a?@?
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 3,0K mei 6 1992 b?jt??.ll?
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 jul 4 2006 h@e@\b??
That... doesn't look too good
My guess is that this is just the original problem escalating into something much worse.
My logs are now sprinkled with this type of error:
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: sd 13:0:0:0: [sde] Unhandled sense code
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: sd 13:0:0:0: [sde] Result: hostbyte=0x00 driverbyte=0x08
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: sd 13:0:0:0: [sde] Sense Key : 0x3 [current]
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: Info fld=0x0
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: sd 13:0:0:0: [sde] ASC=0x11 ASCQ=0x0
Jul 14 18:34:54 arch kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev sde, sector 175952
The sector numbers in the last line always seem to be in the 175xxx or 160xxx range, but a lot of different ones occur.
I have a few questions about this. The most important one is: can I do anything to fix this? Or should I just get another MP3 player. I'm just a poor student, rather short on cash at the moment, so it would be quite awesome if I could use this one for another while.
Also, what is the nature of this issue? If it's hardware related, I reckon I might as well just toss it in the bin right away. If it's a software problem, resetting the iPod through iTunes and then reinstalling rockbox should do the trick, right?
I might as well try this, it doesn't seem like it could do any more damage. I'd have to install iTunes though... yuck
I have no idea how this came about, as far as I recall I didn't drop it or abruptly disconnect it, or anything. The matter is complicated by the fact that this is a flash memory player; most information I find about this kind of problem is only applicable to hard drives. Maybe the flash memory is just dying of old age, I don't know.
Can anybody shed some light on this? Maybe even point me in the right direction to get it working again? It would be very much appreciated. Thanks!