Writing a rant about my iPod has been on my TODO list for a little while. The rant was to be about the severely annoying problem of my ipod crashing, then spontaneously rebooting when I attempt to play a large mp3 file, and by large, I don’t mean that large: attempting to play most podcasts over 40 minutes in length caused the ipod to crash & reboot.
However, today I decided to try researching the problem a little bit first, because as you all know, Google knows everything. I of course was not the only person to experience this problem, and as it turns out, there is an easy fix for it. I found the solution at this ZDnet post, but it is for MS Windows users.
On my Mac, the solution was essentially the same, but I used the command line to quickly locate and remove the problem files. Here are the steps that I followed:
1. Plug-in the iPod. An icon for it should show up on your desktop. If it doesn’t, then the file-browsing function, aka “disk mode”, is probably not enabled, and I forget how I enabled it in the first place, but I’m sure that Google will be able to tell you how to enable it.
2. Open the Terminal (its in the Utilities folder). Run the command “df”, to see where your ipod is mounted. For total newbs, running a command consists of typing it and pressing enter, in the Terminal window.
$ df Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on ... /dev/disk2s3 28G 14G 13G 52% /Volumes/BrentPod
As you can see, my iPod is mounted on /Volumes/BrentPod (this dir is known as the “mount point”). Change to the Device directory on your iPod running the command:
cd /Volumes/BrentPod/iPod_Control/Device
substituting “BrentPod” for the name of your own mount point.
Remove the Preferences and radio files by running the command:
rm Preferences radio; cd
3. Eject the iPod either by pressing the eject icon in iTunes, or by dragging the iPod icon from your desktop to the Trash.
4. Reboot the iPod by holding down the middle button and the menu button. Problem solved!
