Shuffle Recovers from 'Lights of Death'

Those of you that know me, know that I've been limping along iPod-less for a little over three weeks now. My 512MB iPod Shuffle had been experiencing the green-orange Lights of Death.

It would not play, and no computer I had access to would recognize it either as an iPod or a thumb-drive. I had even taken it to the local Apple store for a Genius to look at, and had no luck there.

The troubling thing to me was the method of failure... it seemed more like a firmware issue, and not a component failure. I'm not so sure now. The day it died I had hooked it up to my work computer's docking station for an emergency charge. It worked fine after that, on the car ride home. Then, when I went to plug it into my Mac, it wouldn't show up. Is there some kind of weird overcharging issue?

My plan was to let the battery drain, and see if I could trigger some other kind of reset. Wishful thinking, since flash memory doesn't erase that way.

Over the long weekend, I noticed that a new iTunes came out, and a new iPod Updater. I had tried the previous iPod Updater, but since I couldn't get the iPod to show up in the Mac, it couldn't update it. I downloaded this new updater, and iTunes. I fiddled with my Shuffle a bit, and it still had the Lights of Death... so I wasn't very hopeful when I plugged it in. I was surprised when iTunes gave me the message, "There is new firmware for your iPod, would you like to update now?" Heck, yeah!

So, I just finished a bike ride with my resurrected Shuffle, and things are much better.

Update: Apple releases utility to reset the 1G iPod Shuffle. See: http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/ipodshuffleresetutility10formac.html.