Last week, I decided to take chances on starting a new hobby. I always liked the idea of fixing electronic devices, I even took Embedded Software classes back in college a few years ago. However, I think my interest in it died out and came back to life this year, as I was longing for a hands-on hobby.

I think either my parents or my godfather gifted me this bad boi. This guy accompanied me for 5 or 6 years until its battery died and smartphones got popular in 2009/2010. I tried getting it fixed with someone and it didn’t work out for reasons I can’t recall.

BUT, but, I still owned it, and with no hope of getting it up and running, I wanted to give it a try fixing this 7th gen iPod Classic.

It’s not in good shape, but it’s still not that bad… yeah, I didn’t take good care of it. I used the hell out of it. 80 GB at that time was The Shit. It held a lot of music, and I shamelessly torrented entire discographies that I can’t even grasp the insanity.

Let’s just say that, music-wise, I was never bored.

I followed some guides on how to replace its battery, mainly this one.

If you want to restore one of these devices, I recommend getting a rubber surface to avoid frying the board with static. Let me tell you this: It is one of the most difficult devices to get open, but simple to restore. It’s all due to the metal back cover that has 14 clips holding it with the black cover.

You can use a set of pry to open it up. The usual way is to use metal ones. You can buy 8 of them and go on each side, or use a single pry to unclip by bending the cover outwards. I got a small electronic repair toolkit and it came with a set of plastic pry tools. For all that is worth, do not use the plastic ones. They’ll be eaten up, little by little, and rendered useless in no time if you try to bend the metal cover.

I ended up using a Swiss knife and bent the sides to get it open. I didn’t care if the cover got bent as replacements are cheap anyway.

Once you unclip the 14 clips that keep the iPod still, you open it up carefully as a two-set piece due to the board being connected by the battery, top button, and audio jack fixed on the back plate.

So this is the 80GB hard drive with a piece of foam glued in its back to avoid contact with the back plate and make it shock-resistant.

That is the battery that goes along with the top lock button and P2 audio jack circuitry. They’re connected to the board underneath the hard drive.

The battery is connected to the board, which you can access by flipping the hard drive up.

It’s in a neat state though. I can’t see any damage to it, so I decided to take some readings from the old and the replacement batteries for voltage. I couldn’t get any values out of them, but I assumed that it’s possible that I might be misusing the multimeter.

So I decided to replace the battery with a new one that I bought. The old one is connected by a plug on the board that I can attach the connector.

So there’s the connector, the orange tape located at the corner of the board. You lift the plug by holding it against the board connector and replace the battery. It’s just glued to the back metal cover, so no need to worry about it.

The replacement battery has some sort of double-sided tape or glue, so you fix it in place and plug the connector back.

Assemble everything back, and connect the iPod back to the computer. Let it charge for a few hours or a whole day, and then it’ll be good to go!

In theory, it should be good to go. In practice, however, mine kind of worked, but the hard drive was corrupted. I had to restore it in DFU mode, and the screen was pitch black, so I assumed that it was dead.

Trying to fix something that was dear to me and somehow succeeding felt really good though. But at the end of the day, I won’t be fixing the screen, the buttons, or the plates. It feels like closure for me. The past doesn’t need to be fixed, and while we have the agency to fix things in our lives, the life we have or once had is not something to be fixed.

It’s not a bad thing to call it quits. We need to choose our battles wisely. Probably something with a Raspberry Pi 3 that I have. We’ll see. :)