I was inspired to do this after watching a YouTube video (saved in the database here). I picked up an iPod Classic 5th Generation on eBay for around §50 which was in working order, but barely. The battery was absolutely goosed. Before restoring it, I did manage to get into diagnostics menu, which showed that aside from the battery the unit was otherwise in excellent condition. I was also able to boot it into the full UI once: to my delight, the device hadn't been wiped by its previous owner, nor by its subsequent reseller(s), and had over 20GB of music! I quickly powered it off and waited for spare parts to arrive.
I considered the options available to me, and ultimately decided to install a 2TB mSata SSD. This isn't the most popular storage solution for these projects - many people prefer SD card adaptors because they're lighter on power usage - but Murphy in his final form is also going to serve as a backup drive for all of my stuff, not just my music, so reliability was more important to me. And besides - I opted for the biggest battery I could find that would fit the casing at 3000mAh, and I'll mainly be using the device for playback at home, so I can't imagine it'll ever be an issue (until eventually the battery needs to be replaced again).
It took me a while to make up my mind on a colour scheme. As is evident from this site, I'm a big fan of monochrome, and also of vinyl; so I was tempted to replicate that in my choice of front and back plates. But I also love retro styling, vintage tech, and old video games like Supaplex.
Supaplex!
The final form was obvious: a little love note to one of the first video games I ever remember playing. A clear, transparent front plate. A yellow clickwheel. A red centre button, for Murphy himself. And a plain chrome backplate to match the soldering on the circuit board.
So I ordered up the parts, and impatiently awaited their arrival. (Actually, at time of writing, I'm still waiting on the battery and backplate, as they're on back order - I ended up ordering another 650mAh battery just so I could get going!) Once enough of them trickled in for me to make a start, I set to it.
Before this project, I've only had second-hand experience of repairing technology, and I'm okay-ish at troubleshooting basic problems, so tearing down and rebuilding an iPod did feel intimidating at first. But I watched and read several different tutorials (including many episodes of DankPods), until the components looked familiar to me.
I was able to complete most of the refurbishing over one evening, and it was less difficult than I anticipated: fiddly, but not hard. The worst part was detaching the logic board from the inner metal frame - I was really worried about breaking something, but it all went fine.
Once I'd hooked things back together, it was time to test if Murphy was still alive in there. I've never been so excited to see an LCD screen light up. I had to put him into Disk Mode before I could restore it fully through iTunes, but after that it was plain sailing! My research had told me that this step can sometimes prove tricky, with iTunes having tantrums and throwing up useless "unknown error" messages, but in my case it went just fine.
I'm not finished with this project just yet. I've still got the new backplate and battery to install once they arrive (a quick job), then I'll need to secure the SSD into its final place with some double-sided tape and whatnot. Once it's all together, I can finally start using it - and part of that, for me, will be installing Rockbox. I really want that MS-DOS-like theme! Plus it'll just be so much easier to manage my files that way. iTunes is useful for organising old music back into folders, for sure, but I really have no idea how much longer Apple will continue supporting the software, or whether they'll deliberately brick it once they stop. Besides, I'm not going to be buying any more music via iTunes, so it'll be up to me to keep my new music organised! This plan ended up changing. See logbook, page nine.
So yeah. That's the story of Murphy, up to now.