A customer want to recover about 25Gb of music from her ipod photo (30GB hard drive).

Apparently, the ipod no longer works, and she deleted all her music from her PC. She said she reset the ipod multiple times, but it keeps coming up with either a blank screen, or a frowning face.

I give it a try, as it probably has a laptop 2.5″ hard drive.

Turns out it has a weird Toshiba 1.8″ HDD… the connector looks identical to an CF card connector, except for a circle and an oval hole past the end of the rows of pins…

Hmmm, this is looking more difficult than I thought.

There is no indication that the drive will not work in a CF reader, so I try it… but it doesn’t work… it doesn’t even start spinning.

Another alternative, is to buy a special (ie expensive) adapter, so that it will “talk” over a normal IDE cable…

I’m not sure I want to go down that path. I figure I’ll just reassemble it, and give it back (no fix no charge).

Out of curiosity, I look at the apple website, and go through the troubleshooting section… I give the ipod a reset… and after the second reset, it comes back to life!

Unfortunately, the customer has already purchased a new ipod… so it looks like she’ll have 2 ipods now…