Guide: Using an iPod classic with bad sectors

[ipodclassicuser]

Hi All!

I recently bought an used iPod Classic 6th gen. While the storage capacity on the backside is specified to be 80 GB, I was only able to copy around 20GB of data to the hard drive before the iPod would shut itself off.

This turned out to be caused by a lot of bad sectors on the hard drive - my guess is that a previous owner dropped it at some point. Replacing the hard drive is "Very difficult" according to iFixit, so I figured I would try to word around the bad hardware from software instead. I succeed in finding all the bad sectors, and in creating a FAT32 filesystem in which clusters with bad sectors are marked as bad. This allows me to use 75GB out of 80GB.

I am really happy and impressed with Rockbox so to contribute something back, I made a write-up of the process which you can find here:
http://anderstrier.dk/2019/03/22/using-an-ipod-with-a-bad-hard-drive/

I hope it helps other people having same problem. Be warned: this fix is not trivial (e.g. you'll compile your own mkfs.fat program), and you may just end up wasting a lot of hours.

- Anders

[Duceboia]

Is much simpler swap disk (or card).
Thanks for the tip anyway.

[cereal_killer]

Wow, this was a very interesting read. The iPod Classics are really hard to open. So this guide is very useful to still use an iPod with a faulty disk.
Thanks ipodclassicuser!