iPod woes and “wahey!”s
Some of the more alert among you may have noticed that I recently pulled my post concerning Apple and iTunes 7 - not, as some may have surmised, due to impending lawsuits or anything as glamorous; no, just a dodgy hard drive…
…which, as I later found out, is not uncommon with 4G devices. What to do?
A bit of Googling later, I established that the necessary replacement hard drive is a Toshiba MK4004GAH; made for the laptop market but now sadly discontinued. Did anyone have one? Need I answer?
I spotted a few on eBay and thought about bidding until I spotted the MK6006GAH also for sale - the 60gb version, and only a few quid more. That was the one for me 
After a few bids and a nailbiting wait, I won the drive for only £45 including shipping - a bargain, considering Apple want nigh on £200 to replace just a 40gb drive (and won’t perform upgrades)!
A bit more Googling showed me how to dismantle my iPod (disclaimer: doing this will certainly void any warrantly. Mine was second-hand with no such luxury), so I fitted both the new drive and a replacement battery (£20 from Maplins).
The device fired up first time, I placed it in Disk Mode and connected it to my PC - success! The drive recognised, I proceeded to format it using a freebie partition manager that enabled me to set up a 32Mb partition for the Apple OS and leave the rest for audio.
Reset the device and launched iTunes; got a nice prompt telling me to restore my iPod… The restore process completed, I’ve got a spanking 60gb to fill with my tunes.
I encountered a few problems when trying to sync some 8000+ songs at once, but taking them around 1500 at a time worked just fine.
So, all in all, I’ve increased my storage capacity by another 50% and the battery life restored to around 12 hours; all for just over £65.
Apple upgrades? [cough] Rip-off!
