Spence Crump lives here in Santa Rosa
and has 6th Gen video iPod that was giving him trouble. We set up a time and he brought it over. Once in my hand I could see the tell signs of hard drive failure. You never exactly what was the final thing that does it, but hard drive based iPods are much more delicate than Apple ever indicates. I'm someone that cynically believes they have someone at the end of the assembly line making a sign of the cross and uttering a prayer that the hard drive fail a year and a day after sale so it isn't their warranty problem to solve.
So his drive was gone. The replacement was $100 and labor was $40, but it works perfectly again.
Fixed - Total cost $140.
Julie Hunt called from Tucson, Arizona
about her first Generation iPod Touch... well it's her sons. Somehow he broke the LCD screen without breaking the upper glass or the digitizer and wanted to know if I could fix it. I was still a bit incredulous on the LCD alone breaking but told her to send it in.
She sent it with $60 for me work on *and* it was just the LCD that was cracked. The replacement part was $28 and the
Touch labor fee of $60 brought the total repair to $88.
Fixed - Total cost $88.
Peter Geyer lives in Napa California and his son Zach lives here in Santa Rosa.
Peter had two projects for me. One was his Macbook and the other was his Daughter's iPod. He had Zach bring them over.
The daughter Nicoletta had dropped her Black 5th Generation video iPod one time too many and had permanently damaged
the hard drive. I couldn't make it work again. The replacement drive was $60 and labor was $40
The laptop was a bit more tricky. Peter had installed a separate partition on his drive to run a copy of Windows using
Boot Camp and then deleted the install program. He wanted me to delete the Windows partition. The problem he couldn't surmount is the permissions on the partition. Remember OSX is a UNIX operating system and all UNIX system use three layers of read/write permissions on any file, partition or drive. The permissions in UNXS are - owner-group-world and they are expressed as rwx for read-write-execute (execute assuming it's a script or a binary)
If you saw permission that looked like this
rw-r-r
it would mean the owner can read the file and amend/append it because the owner also has write permission, everyone else can only read the file but make no changes.
The way the nature of the partition, only the owner (in this case the install program) had permission to delete it. I solved the problem by taking the drive out and making it a 'slave' (its an EIDE drive) to another system and deleted it using a command line interface and the statement "rm"
Then I put the drive back in the laptop. The cost to Peter was $125. This was specifically achievable based on my
experience working in 8 computer hardware environments and 18 operating systems. It's a computer based work around.
I'm in Sonoma County... Northern California wine country.
If you live nearby, are traveling through or live in the San Francisco Bay Area bring your iPod to me and I can do the work while you wait or go wine tasting for a while. Send me an
email just to make sure I have on hand whatever parts your repair will require.
Call or email me
with questions or to set up a repair. You can also call, I am here most days from 8am to 8pm
Toll Free 1-877-IPOD-PRO (1 - 877 - 476-3776)
Send the device to:
Frank Walburg
2145 Service Court
Santa Rosa, Ca 95403-3139
