That's right folks. The iPod Photo that I bought with my birthday money back in June has croaked, and i for one am not impressed. This may be what 3-year warrenties are for, but i've lost a fair ammount of music that will either take weeks to restore or months to track down again (90% of what i had was ripped from CDs, but i don't have a lot of time these days to copy over my library again). I'm taking the thing to futureshop tomorrow afternoon, to invoke the warrenty (not even a year after i bought the @!$@ thing).

I need some vibes from my fellow Massassians. Hopefully the store can resolve the problem without much hassle.

Dang, I've had my iPod Photo since January and it's doing great. I'm sure you can salvage the hard drive, so don't get rid of that. Why don't you keep your music library on your computer?

Yeah, that's what I was wondering. It's usually smart to, you know, back stuff up.

It may have something to do with the fact that i format every few months (just to keep the machine free of viruses, spyware, leftover progs, whathaveyou.) As for the HDD, i'm not ripping the thing apart as it would void the warrenty. Its not Apple's warrenty though, so i should at least get some decent service. I simply hadn't finished restoring all of the old files yet (i got a partial dump. maybe 50% of the music not on CDs, though it was my favourites that i managed to save anyway).

Yeah man, it's partially your fault for not keeping backups.

Sucks about the iPod though. It's probably just the battery in which case you could still salvage the drive.

I still do not understand why people reformat their computers so much. Maintain it yes - but don't freaking reformat it every month to keep it running well

Yeah, you do not need to format quite so often. This is what uninstalls are for. And you can really keep away spyware by watching what sites you browse. Last time I formatted was...back in 2004 I believe.

And that doesn't mean you can't back up your stuff on another drive.

Good luck with your iPod. I format once a year and it works great. I partitioned part of my drive off to work as a back up drive which leaves me plenty of room to keep all my program install files and my whole My Documents folder (including music) so that I keep everything when I do format. You may want to look into partitioning your drive.

Partitioning your drive is a great idea.

I always do a 4-5 GB partition dedicated to Windows and drivers (video card, sound card, etc).

The rest of the drive is on another partition. So if Windows blows up, your data isn't gone.

You may need to reinstall some programs though. Most programs require registry entries nowadays. You can usually export those entries and plop them in the install folder in case something happens, so you can restore it. But other programs (such as Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop) just add way too many registry entries, and many are well hidden, as a copy-protection maneuver.

stupid question, is that pic real, if not, what is it based on.

I still need a program to partition my HDD (i should at least have most of what i lost on various DVDs floating around the room). Just got back from futureshop though, and apparently i'm going to have to ship the !@@@#^ thing to Apple - at my own expense (though Futureshop will apparently reimberse me). Ah well, back to the old iRiver... assuming i can find it :()

***EDIT***: I don't know how, or why, but my iPod lives!!!!!!! So much for the warrenty, but this beats the hell out of having to use the 128mb iRiver for the next few weeks :D.