A good friend of mine stayed with us a few days. With her she brought her broken iPod as rumor had it that I was a Mac healer. It appeared to be a severe case. The iPod displayed a broken folder icon when starting up and it didn’t mount on the desktop. Even after checking with Disk Utility and DiskWarrior which had helped me with severe hard disk problems in the past, I wasn’t able to fix it. I checked some forums and the Apple discussions groups and I figured out that it was a pretty common problem that arose after some years of using the iPod. So, the only solution was to get a new hard disk.
But I wasn’t willing to give up — not yet. So, I listened to the noise of the hard drive and I could hear how the disk’s head was kind of stuck when trying to mount. As my friend told me that she was already about to toss it away, I wanted to give it one last chance. I firmly hit the iPod several times against a wooden chair — et voilà — the head of the drive moved on and the iPod started up perfectly. I checked the disk with DiskWarrior and replaced the directory but there weren’t any severe problems and the iPod played music happily ever after…