Don't trash an iPod with bad blocks on the drive

Jan 24, '11 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: bryo

I had bad blocks on my iPod classic 120gb. I was told to trash it and by a certified technician but I wouldn't give up. I tried reformating at least 50 times. My iPod would restore and show up in iTunes no problem but I couldn't copy more than 2gb of data before iTunes would hang.

I also tried reformating the iPod with Disk Utility. I was able to format but not with 'zero out data' selected (recommended for fixing bad blocks). I even tried changing the partition map through terminal but was unsuccessful.

You can try the following procedure which worked for me.

Caution: This will erase all data on your iPod.

That's it. You should now be able to copy/sync freely without iTunes hanging. I'm assuming the 'Free Space' partition skipped the bad sectors of the disk. For whatever reason this worked and even though my 120gb iPod is now only a 114gb iPod it works fine and will last me, hopefully, a couple more years.

[crarko adds: I haven't tested this one. I suspect the author just got lucky that this worked when deleting the partition with the bad blocks. They could be anywhere on the drive, and the drive may continue to deteriorate. Having said that, as a last-ditch effort to resuscitate a dying iPod I suppose this is worth trying. As with any other storage device you care about, keep those backups up-to-date.]

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