15000 Songs in Your Pocket…

…well, 14595, to be precise, but it could easily take 15K by the time I was finished with it.

Ok, in September 2021, I was given a 2nd Generation iPod Mini. I had previously had one of these from their launch in 2005 and was aware of their upgradeability, but I had never gotten around to doing that to mine.

The battery in this one was now pretty much useless, and I thought that if I fitted a new battery, I might as well do a storage upgrade too. The process for doing this is pretty well documented on various other websites, so this post is more about my experience. Also, I didn’t take many detailed photographs at the time either.

I  bought a new battery, an SD to Compact Flash adapter, and a 256GB SD Card.

Step one: Remove the plastic covers from the top and bottom with gentle heat and a spudger.

Step two: This exposes a top plate held in with two Phillips screws. On this, one looked like someone had already had a go at taking it out, but with some gentle persuasion, there was just about enough left to remove it.

The bottom plate is held in purely by the two tabs on either side and with some appropriate pliers, this one popped right out.

Step three: With the bottom plate removed, it exposes the logic board and the connector for the click wheel. With a plastic spudger, this can then be carefully popped off.

Step four: Now that the click-wheel is disconnected, the internals can be carefully slid out, with a bit of pressure applied from the top. This also brings out the display, so be extra careful not to damage this.

Step five. Remove the black tape from the battery and the Microdrive. The MD then can then be slid off from its connector. The battery connector can also be unplugged and the battery removed.

Step six: At this point, I encountered what I thought was a problem with the battery, as it didn’t quite fit. With a push and a squeeze, it would go into place, but this caused the logic board to flex slightly. The problem was actually with some rubber mountings on the Microdrive’s sides. I had moved these over to the SD Card adapter. However, I don’t think they are required. So after removing them altogether, everything fit into place ok. 

Step seven: This was just a reversal of disassembly, taking care when sliding the internals back into the casing. I didn’t remove and apply new glue to the plastic plates, as it was something I forgot to buy. There was enough original glue to hold them in place; I can always replace that later. Over a year later, it’s something I still haven’t done.

Step eight: The final step was to hook it up to a Mac and let it install the OS. I had issues getting it to be recognised on my 2013 iMac, but I did have an older iMac at the time, which seemed to work better. Once it had initialised the storage and installed the OS, I hooked it up to my main iMac and copied the 14595 tracks of my iTunes library across. A step that took around 2 hours to do.