(Given how upset I am with all of this, I'm going to provide a background story kind of just as a way to vent. If you're not interested, just skip it.)
[backstory]
For the last few years I've been using a relatively unknown player that was only made for a little while—the Olympus m:robe MR-100. Before I purchased it in late 2005 I really had little desire to own a music player at all, but this thing was priced at around $100 dollars, which for a 5GB player I felt was a totally reasonable price. I bought it and was pretty happy with it. Recently Rockbox was ported to it, which added some features I'd wanted for a long time, but never expected I'd see. Basically, it added support for Ogg Vorbis, and at the time I transcoded a lot of my music to low bitrate Ogg files. By doing this I increased the capacity (song-wise) by a fair amount.
However, now I've finally reached that 5GB limit. Being someone with a bit of a hacker's mentality (but not a hacker), my first thought was
I'll mod it. Throw a bigger hard drive in there and I'll be good to go. This would have been my ideal solution, but the hard drives that it came with were something of an obscure interface. I found an 8GB model from the same manufacturer and of the same interface... but nobody sells them.
To backtrack a bit, for quite a while before the m:robe rockbox port, I'd been wanting to find a used iPod mini to throw it on so I'd be able to have Ogg Vorbis support, etc. I'd kept my eyes on eBay and figured if I ever had the extra cash I'd snag one. The problem was, most of them were selling for around $60 dollars.
But when I filled up my m:robe, I looked again. I'd read about putting Compact Flash cards into iPod minis, and I decided this would be the preferred route. I decided I'd get the iPod, buy an 8GB CF, put Rockbox on it and be good to go. So after about 2 days of watching eBay auctions, I won a 2nd gen blue iPod mini 4GB for roughly $35. Bought a replacement battery and the CF card at the same time, and figured it'd be an easy conversion once it all arrived.
The iPod got here first, about 2 days after I won the auction (the seller lived in a neighboring state). I installed iTunes and put just a few songs on it just to test it out, make sure it worked, etc. It did. As I'd expected, though, the battery life was bad, which might be why the guy decided to sell it. No big deal, though; it worked, I got it for a reasonable price (at least as far as I was concerned), and it was only a matter of time before everything else got here so I could do the mod.
The other stuff took longer than I'd expected to get here (much longer—the battery only a week, the CF card about 2!), but in that time I used the iPod as it was just to get used to it.
[/backstory]
One day the hold button was stuck in the on position—that is, the hold switch was on, making it so I couldn't turn it on or use the buttons or anything. It was really stuck—really,
really stuck. After a little struggling I decided I just wasn't going to be able to get it to budge this way. I removed the top part with the hold switch on it, etc. The hold switch basically was a little piece of black plastic protruding out of a little metal piece that slid two ways. But this didn't move, either. I pushed on it, carefully at first, as firmly as I could. Wouldn't budge. So I pushed harder, maybe a little less carefully, and the plastic peg broke. I was mad, but I figured I'd still be able to maneuver the plastic
inside the metal to the off position, and that I'd just have to live with it without a hold switch. I would be careful.
That's where the real rage starts. Getting what was left of the switch to the off position was not particularly easy. I kind of had to pry at it and push with anything small enough to grab at the plastic. Eventually I used a sewing needle and got it to where it needed to be. Excitedly, I pressed the menu button and was really happy to see the Apple logo show up. I waited for a little while longer, and then I got the sad iPod screen.
So I got really, really, really mad. With all of my purchases together, I'd dumped about $75 bucks into this project, and now, for reasons unknown, the iPod won't work. I don't know why the hold button was stuck. I don't know why manually setting the switch to where it needed to be rendered the iPod unusable. I don't know why I can't use any of this stuff I just bought and that makes me seriously mad. I can't return the iPod itself, because I'm the one that broke it—it arrived just fine. Basically the options I had were as follows: (1) sell it again for parts and get some amount of my money back, so I'm only in a small hole, (2) buy whatever it is that needs to be replaced and finish the project. I looked at new mainboards, and of all the places I saw I think the lowest price was $60, which, if you do the math, is like 70% more than I paid for the iPod itself. Personally, I don't consider this a realistic option.
It's been about two weeks since this little mishap, and I haven't even been able to look at the iPod without getting mad. This is the first attempt I've made at realistically trying to solve the problem. Since then, I've come up with a few other options. Option one: buy another iPod, do the mod on that one, and sell all the extra stuff I've accumulated for parts to make up for whatever gap I have in funds. Option two: trade my current player (the m:robe) straight-up for a 2nd gen iPod, do the mod, and sell the junk for parts. Option three: buy or trade for a 4th gen 20GB iPod, put Rockbox on it, return the CF card, and sell everything I don't need.
OK, so, finally... the point of the post.
Question 1: Realistically, what would I need to purchase to fix the iPod that I have right now, and how much would it cost me?
Question 2: Does anyone have a 2nd gen mini (4 or 6GB) they want to part with, a 4th gen 20GB they want to part with, what price would you be looking for, and would you be interested in a trade?
I'm hopeful that this will generate some kind of good response, so here's to hoping.
*Cheers*
(Originally posted here:
http://www.rapidrepair.com/phpbb/viewto ... f=8&t=2071 )
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