Mar 09, '06 05:26:00AM • Contributed by: djrenekk
What is drive therapy you ask? It is when you write (from 1 byte to 10 KB "smaller being better") at time to the disk until the disk starts writing past the bad sector. How in the heck does this work? I have no clue!; but I know it works.
To perform the drive therapy, here's what I did; you can modify this to fit your needs:
- Make a new folder on your iPod.
- Open TextEdit and start a new document.
- Type numbers, i.e. 0 or 1, and save the document to the desktop every 10 lines. Copy and paste helps fill it quickly. Do a Get Info on the document, and stop adding lines when the file size is 4KB. If your iPod hangs in the next step, you may need a smaller file. Just divide each file size by two every four hangs, i.e. 4KB, 2KB, 1KB, 500B, 250B, ect.
- Copy the text file to the folder you made earlier and open that folder. Then option-drag your text file to copy it again within that folder.. When you do this from 1 to 1000 times, you may experiance some lag in copying, or a copy window will appear -- this is good. This means that you are making some progress.
If your iPod hangs, reset it, and then unplug and replug it. You may also want to have Disk Utility running to repair the drive every time you reset. Then continue step four, copying over and over. You may have to copy this small file 500 times (or more depending on the size of your damaged sector). When you belive you have passed the bad sector, try copying a large (100MB to 1GB) file to your iPod. If it copies well, then you're good to go. If not, then repeat step four until it does. - Once you are 100% sure you have passed the bad sector, then do not delete those text files! They are a sort of placeholder for that bad area. You can move the folder, but do not delete it.
It may be time consuming, but now I have access to the other 10GB of my iPod. I am not sure that this will work for everyone, but if it can work for me, maybe this is the solution to bad hard drives that come in the 3G iPods. If you have any questions or you don't understand any part of this hint, just leave a comment and I will gladly answer you question.
[robg adds: I don't see how a restore (which does a reformat along the way) wouldn't fix this problem, but apparently it didn't. So consider this a somewhat off-the-wall last-ditch method to save a damaged hard drive. YMMV.]
