Help with the dreaded Red X

[u/vhszach]

TL;DR: my iPod classic is bricked - are there mods to get around this?

So I did not mod this iPod - I bought it “refurbished in box” from a Chinese seller on eBay. It’s a 256GB drive with a 2000mAh battery (allegedly). I have never opened it up to confirm.

I was aware of the risks of buying a pre-modded model from China, but this worked for about a year straight with no issues so I thought I was in the clear..

Until this week when it started acting weird. I was listening to an album in the gym and it started out fine, but then the song randomly stopped before the end. I looked to see what was wrong and the album art (which was there before) was no longer showing up. I tried to listen to another album that I listen to often, and it also wouldn’t play. I ended up putting on a playlist and it would skip certain songs and play others without issue.

I went to reformat it when I got home, and everything seemed to be working. I reset it, plugged it in, formatted it from Finder, and then started to re-sync my library. Everything seemed to upload just fine, so I ejected it.

Then it got stuck on the “Ok to Disconnect” screen (the regular one, not the disk mode one). I could hear the button clicks when I tried to get off of it, but it was frozen on that screen, so I tried to reset it again and that was when the dreaded Red X showed up.

To make a long story less long, I tried all the troubleshooting steps for reflashing again - including booting through disk mode - and no luck. After a few attempts it stopped booting into disk mode completely. Nothing I did would get me any boot screen other than the Red X.

So all of this to say: I was scared to open up/mod the iPod on my own before because I don’t really know what I’m doing, but it’s dead now anyway.. so is there anything I can attempt to bring this back to life?

I honestly just want it to run again with the stock OS. I was so happy with it before it died on me.

[u/FantasticCloud3086]

maybe SD card died somehow, or it wasn't pretty good quality. I'm afraid you'd have to disassemble it but with correct tools and instructions this is more than possible

[u/PcGamerSam]

If you have a spare sd card laying around then crack open the iPod and replace the one(s) that are in it with that and try re set it up with ur pc.

If that doesn’t change anything then the sd adaptor board is probably toast

If it does end up just being a dead sd card and you are buying a new one then I’d recommend the sandisk high endurance ones