Dead iPod - magnet?

[pdebarra]

Looking for something to hold my iPod while in the car, I went into an auto accessory shop. Brought my iPod with me. The guy was trying various things and then, before I knew what was happening, he'd stuck a magnetic holder onto it. When I got back to the car, I found that the player wouldn't work. The drive was spinning kind of randomly: instead of just whirring around peacefully as normal, it was clicking away, spinning, stopping, spinning, stopping. It stayed on, with the backlight also on, for another three hours or so. Then it died. I plugged it into my PC (having tried and failed with all the reset options in the literature). Nothing. Nothing but the clicking of the drive. I eventually managed to get the update program running, after several failed attempts to mount the Pod, and managed to restore the system. After this, it worked normally for about a minute (no music on it, of course) before dying again.

It seems to me that this is clearly linked to the magnet incident. Anyone else had a similar experience? Did you recover from it?

[yellow]

The iPod is a hard drive (with extra bits). Hard drives and magnets do not play nicely with each other. There's no recovering from it. You should wipe it, reinstall the iPod OS, and put your music back on it.

[Las_Vegas]

Unfortunately, a sufficiently strong magnet would have wiped out the low level formatting of the drive. An IDE drive cannot be low level formated at user level. I expect the hard drive is hosed. It would be more inexpensive to replace the iPod than the internal hard drive.

[pdebarra]

Ouch. Just what I feared. Thanks for prompt replies.

[FireWired]

oo, I'm sorry man. :( You should tell the story to the store guy - see what he says about it. :D

[MBHockey]

I doubt this is even covered by AppleCare, if you have it, but it's worth a shot at least.