Paul Rickards' Guide Will Get Your iPod 3G Back Up and Running in No Time Flat

Artist and maker Paul Rickards has put together a guide to turning a classic but damaged third-generation Apple iPod from landfill-fodder into a fully-functional pocketable solid-state MP3 player — complete with dramatically increased storage capacity.

"My first iPod was the iPod 3G so I was a little late to the game. I've own several iPods after that but the iPod 3G I felt was a perfect distillation of the original iPod experience," Rickards explains. "Four separate buttons in a row and a touch wheel (nothing moves) seemed like peak iPod design to me. My original hard drive no longer works so an update to solid state memory seems like a perfect upgrade."

Apple launched its first iPod in 2001, around eight months after the first version of the iTunes media management tool for Mac OS, and while it wasn't the first company to release a portable battery-powered MP3 player its slick marketing saw it become one of the most popular around. Rickards' third-generation model was the last to use dual fixed-frequency 90MHz Arm ARM7TDMI-based processor cores running at 90MHz paired with Wolfson audio codecs — and while all the electronics have proven their longevity, the spinning-platter mechanical Toshiba 1.8" hard drives inside are typically the second part to break after the battery.

With Rickard's iPod hard drive having gone the way of most, it was time for an upgrade — swapping the failed mechanical drive for solid-state storage, using a CompactFlash to IDE adapter board. Rather than using high-priced CompactFlash cards themselves, though, Rickards' upgrade uses a second adapter — this time to convert a lower-cost microSD Card to CompactFlash.

"In a perfect world, you'd be able to plug the iPod into your classic Mac and use iTunes to restore [your songs]," Rickards notes of the software side of the equation. "Unfortunately, the older versions of iTunes can no longer contact Apple's software update servers any more so it will fail." While some solutions exist, all had drawbacks — leading Rickards to go through the partition creation process manually, for which he provides step-by-step instructions.

With a new battery in place, offering a higher capacity than the original, and a repair to a damaged flex cable connector that was failing to transmit one channel of audio, Rickards iPod was back in action — with a range-boosted iTrip accessory for wireless streaming to an FM radio, too.

The full guide is available on Rickards' blog.