kitchen-table surgery
I was down to only 5G freespace on my 80G iPod Video (confession: I’m a hopeless music addict). Google regaled me with visions of a 240G replacement drive and half a dozen websites with transplant instructions. I bit and ordered one. It was delivered in a little over a week. Surgery was performed on my kitchen table. 
1. Prep
2. Opening the case
3. An accident about to happen (see the brown clip?)
4. Oh, that’s how they cram it in there
5. Preparing to remove the old drive
6. But they look the same size!
The transplant was a success, but not without a few touchy moments… the first was during reassembly when I couldn’t secure the battery cable in its socket…and noticed the retainer clip was missing…luckily I found it on the floor and got it back on with tweezers!
The second was after installing the Rockbox bootloader when the iPod crashed at boot. Every time. It turns out the default maximum sector size is hardcoded in the Rockbox bootloader at 1024 bytes. The replacement drive uses 4096-byte sectors. I ended up downloading the Rockbox source, modifying the max sector size, rebuilding it and reinstalling it. Hey, now iPod boots again!
And now I have three times the storage capacity as before — sweet!
November 26th, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Wow Frank. Yes, you are a geek. Reminds me of Torvalds’ famous quote, “when men were men, and wrote their own device drivers”.