Exxodium

Turning an iPod Classic into an iPod 5.5G

So, something quite catastrophic happened to a friend’s iPod classic a week ago: The hard drive failed. I’m guessing it got knocked around at that critical moment when it was spinning the hard drive to queue up a song, and as such, the heads crashed into the platter.

Feeling like the kind person I was, I gave her my old 30GB fifth gen iPod, knowing that everything still worked fine in it. Lo and behold, she got it home, and the DSP (digital signal processor) had failed. So while everything worked, it produced no sound. She handed both of them back, and I had two (seemingly dead) iPods.

I tried prying open the Classic to no avail. This thing was tough to get into. So I set both aside for a few days, then came back to it.

“Wait,” I thought to myself. “The internals of the Classic and 5G iPods are very similar, if not completely similar, so I should be able to combine the two easily.”

And so this project began.

Figuring that the Classic was immensely difficult to get into, and part of the reason I’d transplant it into a 5.5G case was to make it way more repairable, I decided not to even care about destroying the chassis of the Classic to get inside it. After all, this iPod had been through hell; the chassis was pretty much already destroyed. 

(Brief interpolation: All it takes me to get into a 5.5G iPod is my job’s nametag and ten minutes; to get into a classic, it took me a few days. The Classics are difficult to crack open without fucking the chassis up hardcore.)

I drove a few razor blades into the seams, and upon bending the backing out a little bit, it popped free. The back plate was damaged pretty well at this point, but I didn’t care.

Upon freeing the hard drive, headphone jack and battery connectors, it looked like everything from the Classic would fit into the 5G’s case. So I proceeded to unscrew the metal framework from the front plate. BUT DISASTER STRUCK! Upon freeing the screen from the framework, I noticed a giant crack in the middle of it. Powering up the display confirmed the damage.

Well, shit.

But wait, I have the display from the 5.5G! I should still be okay, right? (unfortunately, not. As you’ll see later.)

So I continued, prying up the logic board from the Classic’s framework and setting it in the 5G’s framework. Perfect fit. I reinstalled the screen, and left the Classic’s white click wheel in place to give my iPod a unique look. Sadly, as the Classic’s click wheel was not meant to fit in the 5G’s case, it sunk into the case a little bit, so it wasn’t flush with the front. In my opinion, this was fine because then I could effectively operate the iPod blind, as I would know where the click wheel is.

So I put things together, crossed my fingers, and hoped for the best. I hit the center button.

It started up, but the display colors were way off. I tested the display, and it turned out this was just because the Classic demanded a greater color depth than the 5G’s display could handle. So the colors were off. The display was still usable, however.

Still, the iPod didn’t see any room free on the 30GB hard drive I had connected to it. So I restored it, and it came up corrupt. That’s when fear began to sink in. Fear that I had just wasted a few hours of my time to do this.

I kept disconnecting and reconnecting the iPod, hoping that maybe, just maybe, iTunes would take. Eventually, it did. And I was able to load some music onto it and get it to work.

However, that screen is still almost unreadable because the colors are so completely screwed up.

But it works. And I now have an iPod Classic that can be repaired easily without having to fuck up the case each time I want to repair it.

And here’s a video of it in action.