Backstory
Recently I had bought a box of iPods, all untested for 50 euros. It was really cheap and I couldn't pass on the offer. Plus I was really hoping to expand my collection and see if I could repair any broken ones. I held onto them for several months because I wanted to host a stream testing them which I did on the 29th of July.
The lot consisted of:
- 3G 40GB
- 4G 40GB
- Mini 1G Silver
- Nano 2G Cyan
- 7G 160GB Silver
- 6.5G 120GB Silver
- Two 3G 15GB units
- Two 30GB 5.5G units one black and the other white
- 30GB 5G black
- 20GB Photo U2
- iPhone 4 16GB white (yes, yes, I know it's not an iPod but they included it as a free gift)
Now, onto the repairs...
Having inspected and tested them one by one on stream I found that at first half of them didn't work. For some reason though, half of them started working after a second test. In the end only two didn't work - the 6.5 and 7 gens. The rest had some dead batteries and drives but everything else was functional. I also cleaned them cause they were dirty. One of the 15GB 3Gs and U2 have a dead drive and the iPod Nano has a dead battery. I also found out one of the drives I've had for a while prior to all of this but never tested had Windows on it.
The iPhone 4 also worked but it has a cracked screen, touch and home button work though. It also didn't have an iCloud account and no passcode which I'm taking as a huge win.
The next day, after concluding the stream, I decided to try fixing the two that I couldn't get working - the silver 6.5 and 7th gen. The 6.5G had a shattered screen so I tore both of them apart and put the screen from the 7G. That gave me a white screen, improvement but still bad. I could hear the drive spinning and seeking so I concluded it was a problem from the screen itself. I took the screen from my black 80GB 6G and with it, it worked! Even the drive! After that I went to see what's wrong with the 7G but after trying to charge it with USB and FireWire and cleaning the board, it showed no signs of life. Guessing it's fried. I turned my attention to the 6.5G again - it had some interesting music on it which I decided I wanted to listen to so I made a Shrekpod (DankPods style) by combining parts from the 7G and other 6G I have. In the end I made this:
After using it for a day, I was happy that everything works. The battery and other components from the 7G work and work well, everything except the screen. Another thing I found out is that the black 5.5G has a broken lock switch. Upon further inspection it appears the previous owner had removed it and reinstalled it incorrectly, resulting it the flex cable being twisted one rotation. Reinstalling everything properly and straightening the cable fixed the issue. The battery also had a twisted flex cable and slightly moving it would result in it shutting off instantly. Straightened that one as well and now it works perfectly!
The black 5G was disassembled and I initially thought it didn't have a hdd cable but it was just hidden in the pile of parts. After putting it back together it works perfectly and just needs a new battery cause the original one is missing. This one is in exceptionally good condition and the front plastic plate has almost no scratches at all. I got the battery from the 6.5th gen as it currently is using the battery from the dead 7th gen (very unnessecarily complicated, I know).
The next day I turned my attention to the white 30 GB 5.5G. Since it didn't have anything cool on it I decided to install Rockbox on it to check it out. Installation was pretty smooth, though I had to run the Rockbox utility from the terminal with sudo. I loaded my FLACs and ALACs onto it and after applying a cool monochrome iPod theme, played a song... and that's when I discovered the headphone jack was broken. You could only hear audio from the left side. I quickly opened it up and after inspecting the flex cables and connectors concluded that a solder joint had probably cracked as moving the headphone plug around made the audio temporarily come back. I carefully unglued all of the wires and removed the assembly. On the bottom of the headphone jack assembly is a white cover piece that you can remove. Under it are the solder joints. After reflowing all of them and adding extra solder I assembled it back and after testing it worked! Very reliably as well. So i listened to one of my FLAC albums and called it a day. Another fully functional iPod complete.
Conclusion
And that's about it for now! I'm very happy with the results and I got a lot of them working. I have decided to daily drive the 6.5G and have put all of my music library and a lot of videos I have to watch on-the-go. I'm also using the white 5.5G for checking out new music that I haven't listened to before, mainly all of the stuff from all of the iPods in the lot, as none of them were wiped. I gave the black 5.5G to a friend temporarily so he could check it out and because he expressed interest in listening to my music library.
If I get any more parts or iPods, I might try repairing the rest but for now this is where I'm gonna leave it off. Thanks for reading!
