Dead iPod Mini?

By Jimmy@smalldog.com

Do you have a dead iPod Mini, maybe the screen is cracked, the battery is dead, or the logic board is fried?

Well I’ve had that happen to me and I pulled mine apart and made good use of the hard drive inside. If you iPod works fine, I don’t recommend pulling it apart at all!

You can follow this guide: http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/articles/comments/taking-apart-the-ipod-mini/. That will get the iPod Mini cracked open and from there you can take the hard drive (says Microdrive on it). The hard drive is just like a compact flash card.

I used the card on my Canon Rebel XT and it’s nice having a 4GB memory card. Even if you don’t have a higher end digital camera you could use the drive as a storage device, 4GB is a lot of space! You could carry around a fair amount of music, photos, even some video files!

I’ve noticed that you will need to format the card before using it. If you’re using it on a camera you will need to format it as FAT/MS-DOS, but if you’re using it just as a storage device to carry around some files you can format it as anything, FAT if you’re on Windows or Mac OS if you’re on a Mac.

I had the most luck with using the Lacie Imatumi USB card reader.
http://www.smalldog.com/product/39395

By Jimmy@smalldog.com