An iPod's Demise

So my third-generation iPod died last week. I connected it to sync it via the FireWire dock. When I did that, the spinning disk/magnifying glass image appeared.

My iPod was never to be the same again.

It went through the whole spinning disk routine and came up with a check mark, which apparently indicates that everything was a-OK.

But it wasn't.

I was expecting my iPod to appear in iTunes and sync with all the stuff on my hard drive.

But it didn't.

Instead, what it did do was boot up to the Apple icon that comes on at the beginning, flash off, boot up to the Apple icon that comes on at the beginning, flash off, etc. Nothing more, nothing less.

No short sentence with an ominous message required here.

Today I got around to getting on the phone with Apple (I've been using my wife's iPod to survive the commute in the interim). After trying to milk the $49.95 required for tech support, the gatekeeper went through a few steps with me and figured out that the techies wouldn't be able to help me since it was a hardware problem.

That led me to the http://depot.info.apple.com/ipod/, where I could do what need to be done to get my iPod sent in for fixing. After going through to the end, the total price with tax was a whopping $271.31. That money would put me a good bit of the way to the 60GB iPod Photo I've been itching for. In short, that ended that venture.

So now I'm sitting here with this broken iPod pondering what to do. iPodMods has a repair service, but they charge you a $20 fee before they do anything else (which I find to be sketchy at best) so I've written them an email to see if they can tell me if it's gonna cost me $300 or if they can even do it at all before I drop $20 on them.

So now I'm pondering what happens when you need to get rid of an iPod? It's dead but my Address Book and iCal entries are all in there, which aren't really things I wanna see get pulled out of the trash by some identity thief. If my iPod's truly dead, I'm tempted to take it apart and see how it ticks, but being that I have no idea what I'm doing that might not be such a good idea.