iPod 5G low battery pseudo "Brick" warning

[armandoban]

Wanted to post to warn people (or relieve anyone with issues) about pseudo-bricking on low battery.  This was rockbox-ipodvideo-20060918.

After successful use for a good while my 5G stopped responding for several days and would not go into disk mode, wouldn't boot, wouldn't play..  The HDD "clunked" and the pod froze up with a half-screen showing blank at the top and then interlaced blank/apple logo on the lower half, then it rebooted, and did it again until it died before next button press started this over.  Only showed "charging" indicator when it was plugged in and continued doing the clunking/freezing/rebooting thing.  Over and over and over this happened, rebooting the iPod didn't fix it.

Didn't realize the battery was as low as it had apparently gotten.  Usually I go back and forth plugging it in and playing without plugging in, long use without plugging in drained it too much and I guess and Rockbox didn't give me a low battery warning of any kind I would have noticed while playing music.

Leaving it plugged in for more than 20 minutes fixed it, no problems since.

[Febs]

Please read our posting guidelines with respect to posts related to bricked players.   Your battery ran out, and you needed to charge it.  This is NOT bricking your player or "psuedo-bricking" your player.  

[Llorean]

Seriously, what about "It wouldn't turn on when the battery was low" is at all surprising?

[armandoban]

Perhaps that it would not do anything at all was surprising.  And that it was crashing repeatedly and clunking and malfunctioning, that was admittedly also surprising.  And no warnings or informational messages, also somewhat surprising.  And as far as appearing bricked, the fact that it was 100% unresponsive and acting quite completely broken and beyond any method of flashing back, not to mention it took several days of worrying and almost 20 minutes to recover itself once the problem was apparent, it wasn't just "oh I plugged it in and now it's all better".. this was also surprising and in fact quite a bit like bricking.  I didn't leave it plugged in long because the hard drive kept making that noise, I was worried I'd damage it.  You have to admit this isn't normal behavior for an iPod.

I also mention this post was not intended as a troll and related information wasn't clearly found when I did a forum search.  I was just saying nobody has posted anything about this particular issue happening quite like this.  I had the problem, and figured it out.  It was purely FYI.  It works now, and I'm still using Rockbox.

[Llorean]

Well, let's start with "no warning": There is a battery meter on the screen at all times unless you're using a WPS that explicitly removes it. So not knowing your battery status is as simple as "you didn't look at the screen to check it, ever".

100% unresponsive is pretty reasonable if the battery is *empty* as how will it have the power to respond if there's no juice in it? Your description even hinted at it not having enough power: It chunked (not enough power to spin up the disk) and rendered half the screen (not enough power to draw the whole LCD before running out again).

As for why plugging it in immediately didn't help? In many cases plugging it in starts the charging routine. The battery itself must reach a high enough voltage to boot the device. So if the battery is below that level, you must wait for it to charge up to that level before you can boot the device. In fact *many* rechargeable electronic devices work in a similar way: When the battery dies it must be charged for a certain amount of time (as little as several seconds to as much as an hour or more) before the device is usable at all.

I can understand why you were surprised, but it sounds to me that most of that is simply because you didn't apply much reasoning to the situation, and instead panicked and decided that your device might be bricked.

The real concern is your use of the word "brick" at all. By the time you posted the message, you already knew that your unit was not bricked. We really, REALLY do not like people throwing this word around lightly in these forums. A bricked player is by our definition irrecoverable without hardware work (opening the player and hooking up an external interface, or replacing a piece of internal hardware, in many cases). Pseudo would mean that it was acting like it was bricked, and your descriptions of its actions don't sound like it was even close to acting like it was bricked. We appreciate it if you try to avoid using words that can make other people more frightened of the software. We'll readily admit if something *is* bricked, but something acting in a perfectly logical way when its battery is dead isn't even close to bricking.