iPod, iPhone, & iPad Repair Blog - How to repair all types of iPhones, iPods, & iPads.

iPhone 4 Ran over

2011-10-26T13:35:00.001-07:00

I had a customer that brought in an iPhone 4 that was run over by a car. When he brought the phone in it was bent into a curvature and needless to say the front and back were shattered. The customer pretty much had given up hope for this iPhone. Within an hour we had is iPhone completely back to working condition. Once back together with a new front glass assembly, back glass, and a new bezel we were able to restore it to IOS 5. So if you think it is hopeless for your device you might be surprised at what we can do!

-Chris

IPod 5th Gen and 6th Gen Classics!

2010-11-05T16:07:00.000-07:00

I was recently going through some iPod classics the other day. They were exhibiting some weird problems. During diagnosis the iPods would demonstrate different problems each time it would power on. I changed out the hard drive, battery, and the hard drive flex cable trying to determine the root cause. Lastly, I tried changing the headphone jack flex cable. What do you know! This did the trick. So if your iPod classic is giving you issues and nothing seems to help, try changing the whole back plate. You might be surprised.

iPod Shuffle 2nd Generation Issues

2010-10-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

I have had a few people drop off their Apple iPod Shuffles 2nd generation to me saying that they just stopped working. Great! There is no screen. How am I going to determine what is wrong with these iPods. I started by plugging them up the computer to see if iTunes would pick them up. Of course, it didn’t. I let them sit on the charger for about an hour just to see if maybe it was completely drained of power. Once I realized this was not what was going on with them, I decided that I would just need to open them up and see if anything was visibly wrong with the inside of the iPods. I carefully removed the white plastic pieces from the top and bottom of the shuffle 2nd generation. Once those plastic pieces are removed I was able to slide the mother board out from the bottom where the headphone jack is. As I was looking I could not find anything physically wrong with the mother board. I went with my first instinct which was to solder the battery leads a little bit better hoping that it was just not getting a good connection. This fixed the problem on every single shuffle 2nd generation that I have come across. If your shuffle 2nd generation just dies and you’re not sure what to do, try a re-solder of the batter leads on the mother board. Hopefully you will have the same luck that I had.

Oil-Filled iPod Nano

2010-05-16T09:02:00.001-07:00

Repairing iPods, I come across a lot of different ways people manage to damage / destroy their iPods and iPhones. This week I took apart an iPod Nano 2nd Gen. It had a weird screen affect, and randomly fast-forwarded through songs when turning the volume up and down. Inside, I found oil. Some kind of vegetable or clear oil! It wasn't perfume or lotion (which I've also seen) as it had no smell. I cleaned it up the best I could, replaced the screen, the click-wheel, and the casing. After one night, the oil that remained damaged the new screen. Cussing a bit, I replaced the screen the second time. I'm hoping this one sticks, but who knows. The lesson...keep your iPod away from liquids! Especially oils or anything with sugar (coffee, Coke, etc.).

iPhone 2G Components Glued Together

2010-01-19T20:26:00.001-08:00

In case anyone out there is just starting to look at repairing the iPhone 2G (first generation), below might be some helpful tips.

- The LCD, digitizer (touch screen), and cover glass all come glued together. There is no way to separate theses. I tried a couple times to do it manually and broke all the components. I am wondering though if there is some solvent or treatment that can be done to pull them apart. Let me know if anyone out there knows how!

Flickering iPod Touch Battery Symbol

2010-01-19T20:25:00.001-08:00

Don't worry, a flickering black and white (switching quickly between the charge lightning bulb symbol and the plug symbol) on your iPod Touch is generally an easy fix. It usually means that your USB hub or your power adapter is failing. This happened to me on a recent trip to India. I had a travel charger that was specified to work from 110v to 220v. When I plugged it directly into a wall outlet on Delhi, the power must have been "dirty". The travel charger started working intermittently, but well enough to keep me charged up during the rest of the trip.

If this happens to you; just replace the USB hub or power adapter.

Dead iPod Video Symptoms

2010-01-19T20:24:00.001-08:00

There are a lot of symptoms of a dead iPod video (5th Gen) logic board.

- 100% dead - doesn't boot, shows nothing when connected to an LCD screen, hard drive doesn't spin
- boots, but doesn't recognize hard drive, goes directly to sad face
- boots, prompts to connect to iTunes, but won't restore
- boots, restores, functions correctly, except it doesn't recognize or "talk to" the click wheel
- boots, restores, functions correctly, except no music comes from head phone jack or dock port connector
- boots only to a battery charging symbol
- ...

How to delete voice memos from iTunes?

2010-01-18T04:03:00.000-08:00

With the new iPhone 3.0 Voice Memos feature, new voice memos are automatically added to your iTunes library (if that option is selected in your iPhone configuration). They appear automatically in your Voice Memos playlist, which is nice. But, what if you want to delete them? If you delete them from the playlist, they remain in your library and continue to get synched to your various devices. If you delete them from the Voice Memos folder directly using Explorer, you get the fun "iTunes can not find synch ..." message.

To find and delete the Voice Memos from your library, do the following in iTunes...
- Make sure View > Show Column Browser is UNCHECKED.
- If you don't use the Column Browser you can skip the above step, but most people (including me) use this feature.
- Sort your music (now in one huge list) by Title.
- Scroll all the way to the bottom of the list and you'll see a bunch of files with titles like "9/23/2009 8:23:20:00".
- Select these and choose delete.
- Note, if you have already deleted these using Explorer, they will show with an "!" icon.

The reason this works is because the column browser will only show files in your library that have a value for the selected column (genre, artist, etc.). Since Voice Memos have no artist, they don't show in the column browser.

Apple iPod 5th Generation - Won't go to sleep!

2009-11-13T06:20:00.000-08:00

I've come across a new problem with the 5th Gen iPod Classic (aka Video). The iPod won't go into sleep mode. This is obviously a bad thing because the iPod's sleep mode is it's "off". Without going into sleep mode, even the best battery won't last more than a day.

You can try adding Sleep to the Main Menu in the Settings. That way, if you remember to, you can put it in sleep mode manually. This still didn't work for me though.

Unfortunately, the only way to fix this problem is a logic board (aka mother board) replacement.

iPod Touch - Download error. Tap to retry.

2009-11-10T15:59:00.000-08:00

I'm traveling this week. I now carry two iPods. My trusty 120 GB Classic that has my entire collection. Plus, my trusty 8 GB Touch I use for browsing the web and playing games anywhere (plus there's some music there).

I had an issue today where I used a code on my iPod Touch to download some free music from iTunes. The iPod went into sleep mode while it was downloading and cut off the download midstream. The first thing I did to address this was go into Settings > General > Auto-Lock and change the setting from "1 Minute" to "Never".

This change allowed me to download the entire play list without issue...except for the one that got cut off mid stream. I kept getting the "Download error. Tap to retry." message. This was especially annoying because the iPod Touch kept asking me to log in with my Apple ID.

To fix this, I remoted into my PC at home (using LogMeIn) where my "master" iTunes library is. I then went to downloads and clicked the down-arrow to download the pending track on my PC. Once that was done, I went back to iTunes on my iPod Touch. That cleared the issue. The only downside is that I'll have to wait until I get home to listen to the track that downloaded to my PC instead of my Touch.

Apple iPod Classic 3rd Gen

2009-09-29T17:12:00.001-07:00

I fixed an Apple iPod Classic 3rd Gen today. It turns out that the hard disk connector was broken by someone who had attempted their own repair. I've got plenty in stock. Swapped it out and, the iPod is good to go. The symptoms were that the iPod would boot, would go into disk mode, would be recognized by iTunes, but iTunes would never show it in the Devices drop-down.

Apple iPod 5th Generation 80 GB

2009-07-30T19:02:00.000-07:00

I'm fixing an 80 GB iPod 5th Generation for a buddy of mine. I diagnosed it as a bad motherboard. I ordered a new motherboard and replaced it successfully today. It boots up to the 'must restore iPod' screen, goes through the motions of being restored in iTunes, but when iTunes goes to reboot it, it doesn't go to the Apple logo and boot screen. It just immediately returns to the 'do not disconnect' flash screen. I've let it fully charge and still no luck.
UPDATE: It appears that all of the 80 GB hard drives I had were bad AS WELL AS the motherboard. Plugging in a brand new motherboard with a good 60 GB hard drive has brought my buddy's 80 GB iPod 5th Generation back to life.

iPod 20GB 4th Gen U2 Version

2009-06-23T17:10:00.000-07:00

I had an interesting thing happen while putting a new hard disk in a 20GB U2 4th Gen iPod today. The hard disk connector cable had to be *just right* in order for it to not "repeat click" the hard disk. It's closed up now and synching fine. I'll put it through it's QA paces and see if it stays alive.

iPod Hard Disk Analysis

2009-06-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

One of the best sites I've found for diagnosing iPod hard disks once they are out of the iPod is below...
http://www.command-tab.com/2006/04/05/really-testing-ipod-hard-drives/

Cool technical info on iPod Hard disks...

2009-06-22T19:26:00.001-07:00

I found this web site with some cool information on the partitions on an iPod hard disk...
http://www.bsodmike.com/pages/how-to-upgrade-your-ipod/

20GB iPod 4G Dies When Attempting To Restore From Disk Mode

2009-06-22T15:07:00.000-07:00

I have an iPod 20GB 4th generation that has a brand new hard drive. The hard disk spins up. It will go into disk mode. The battery will charge in disk mode. The battery also seems to hold its charge. There seems to be some problem reading the hard disk as the HDD R/W, SMRT DAT, and HDD SCAN all fail. This *should* work because it's a 820-1723-A motherboard with a MK2006GAL hard disk. Let's see if I can figure this one out...
UPDATE: I found out that almost all of my problems getting 4th Gen Classics up and running was a bad (or badly seated) hard drive flex cable. The best way to diagnose this is to go into diagnostic mode and check for SMARTDATA. If the SMARTDATA doesn't come back, it's the hard drive flex cable. If it does, the problem is something else.

20GB iPod 4th Gen Crashes When Connected To Firewire

2009-06-19T20:40:00.000-07:00

I have an iPod 4th Gen 20GB that crashes when connected to any Firewire powered adapter or wall charger. It charges and works fine when being charged with USB. After the crash, after disconnecting from the firewire power supply, it shows the sad face for a little while (sometimes only a few minutes), then comes back alive again. It has a brand new HDD so I'm thinking it's either the logic board (ak!) or the battery. I'm going to try and replace the battery and see if that makes any difference.

iPod 120GB Classic - Genius Stopped Working

2009-06-07T07:09:00.001-07:00

I have an older Windows XP PC with USB 1.2. When I bought my iPod 30GB Video, I added a third-party 4-Port USB 2.0 PCI card to give me faster data transfer and synchs. Earlier this year I upgraded to the iPod 120GB Classic. The new iPod has some incompatibility with the PCI card and crashes the XP PC when attempting to synch. I've had to move to the old USB 1.2 ports for now.
Recently, I had forgotten about this incompatibility. I plugged my 120GB into the PCI expansion card. This crashed my PC while synching. Once I moved the iPod back to the USB 1.2 port, everything synched again, but Genius (one of the best features of the 120GB) stopped working. The fix was a complete restore. This took over 24 hours on a USB 1.2 connection, but it was worth it. Now I'm back to normal synchs and a working Genius.

3G iPod Nano won't charge or boot?

2009-06-06T08:19:00.000-07:00

Shows nothing when plugged in to either USB or Firewire adapter.
UPDATE: After charging via Firewire adapter for several hours, the battery got warm and the Nano was recognized breifly as a USB device. I plan to attempt to replace the battery.
UPDATE: I replaced the battery and that has the Nano working again, but...I managed to break the screen in the process. I have another one on its way from China. I'll replace the screen and hopefully will be go-to-go!

30GB 5G iPod won't recognize any HDD?

2009-06-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

When I go into diagnostic mode and check HDDStats, I get garbage as if the HDD isn't even plugged in.
UPDATE: I'm theorizing that the main logic board is bad. I'm going to replace it ($40 outch!) and see if that does the trick.

20GB 4G HDD works in PC, but not in iPod?

2009-06-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

I have a 20GB 4G HDD that works when attached to a PC (using IDE adapter), but doesn't work in either 20GB iPods that I have. What could cause this?
UPDATE: Could be the logic board. I'm going to try a brand new HDD ($20) first and see if that does the trick.
UPDATE: I've learned a few tricks about 20GB iPod Hard drives. The main one is that if the hard disk has *any* sector errors, it wont boot in the iPod. It *will* boot in a PC, just not in an iPod. This makes the HDD useless for an iPod, but possibly useful in a PC.