My nephew said my old iPod 'still works' and I spent 2 hours proving him wrong
He was visiting from Reno and saw my 2006 iPod Video sitting in a drawer, plugged it into his laptop, and announced it 'still worked' like he'd found buried treasure. But the battery dies in about 11 minutes now, iTunes on his new Mac won't even see it as a device, and the click wheel only registers about half my thumb swipes. I tried that open source Rockbox thing people talk about on here but the install kept failing at the bootloader step and I gave up. Has anyone actually gotten one of these running again without swapping the drive to flash, or am I just chasing a ghost at this point?
Dealt with a few of these myself and honestly the battery and click wheel are the easy part. You can get a new battery for like 15 bucks on eBay and the click wheel ribbon just needs a good cleaning with isopropyl alcohol, half the time the swipes stop registering because of gunk not because it's dead. The iTunes thing on newer Macs is a lost cause though, modern macOS dropped support for these old devices so you need to use a Windows machine or an old Mac with an older OS to sync it. Rockbox failing at the bootloader usually means you didn't put it in disk mode first, hold menu and center until the screen flashes then it should mount and the install goes through. But real talk, if the drive still spins up fine you don't need to flash mod it, just fix the battery and wheel and sync from an old computer.