No lie. One time my cat was playing around with my iPod and when I picked it up, it had a funky debug-looking menu screen on it. I flipped out and thought that my new iPod 5G was totally busted. Well I eventually got it back to its normal mode, but what I didn’t know is that there was a diagnostic menu for testing purposes.
In case you want to skip the video, hold the middle button down whilst holding the up button to reset the iPod. Then when it resets, hold the button left button and it’ll boot into diagnostic mode. This can tell you all sorts of wicked information about your iPod’s internal guts, let you ren utests, and totally freak people out. If you want to get out of it, just manually reset it again by holding the middle buttown and the top button.
[via Digg]
This is a good joke to play on somebody to freak them out…
Jon: “oh my god man… what happened to your ipod?”
Vince: “what? what? broken? Nooooooooooo… ”
Jon: “you know what, I always wanted an ipod”
Vince: “you have???”
Jon: “let me take it off your hands for 50$, its broken anyhow, you can go buy yourself a brand new nano with even more options”
Vince: “you got a deal”
Moral of the story… fear my cunning!
Jon
Asshole.
Holy spell check Batman.
I don’t understand people like you David… who cares how something is spelled as long as you get the message – by the way, I don’t see any spelling errors (????). I have noticed the spelling and grammar on this board to be better then most…
Jon
Hehe – love the story, Jon. And I think you spelled “Nooooooooooo…” wrong. It needs a couple more Os. :)
Jon:
“you ren utests” and “the middle buttown”. Not that I have a problem with it…
Anyways, doesn’t seem to be working on my old and busted (but still new to me) 3rd gen iPod. I think I’ll try it out later tonight on my brother’s shuffle.
tried it didnt work :(
hmm this is incorrect…
Hold Middle and Up
When it reboots
Hold Middle and Left
wasn’t explained too great!
Works like a charm Liam…
You must hold middle and left not just left.
But does it only tell you stuff, or does it let you actually fix it? XD seems a bit…useless if you can’t do anything with the info.
Now, how do you put your cat in diagnostic mode?
Elodie:
http://www.methodshop.com/mp3/ipodsupport/diagnosticmode/
Check it out, explains everything. Diag mode doesn’t let you fix anything from it, but you can see what you need to fix (e.g. you can tell whether you have a broken iPod subspeaker or not if you ever needed to know).
Funky trick.
I have fixed two ipods using this.
Just put it though its reset thing – chews batterys though.
The combination is a little different on older ones but its something similar.
One was frozen (5G 30gig), and the other (1st gen nano 4gig) would only charge over USB – not register as being able to connect to itunes or as a form of storage or anything. Worked fine for playback and whatever – just wouldn’t connect to compys.
Addenum -
Obviously the thing *won’t* fix something if its got a serious problem…
My two cases must just be software quirks.
I like this option !
The idea of doing that to your frien without him noticing…
Hey, that’s pretty frikkin sweet!!
Don’t know what I’ll ever do with it (besides possibly make someone thing they’ve bricked their iPod) but still pretty sweet.
Hey, mine completed successfully. Guess I don’t need to go out and buy myself a new one. Damn.
I hope this can bring my 2nd gen back from the dead – awesome post.
I so don’t care how bad his spelling is but his advice fixed what stupid apple’s troubleshooting couldn’t. Cheers guy