The other day a friend of mine was having trouble with his 3rd generation iPod. The 3G iPod is the one with the four glowing red touch-sensitive controls nestled between the wheel and the display. His iPod was showing the ‘please plug me in’ icon. You could hear the hard drive spin up, start reading and then stop. I was concerned that the 40 gig drive was dying but usually a failing drive emits a repetitive clicking sound.

He had already tried to connect the iPod via USB to two different computers in an effort to satisfy the iPod’s request. iTunes nor Disk Utility could read the iPod.

We checked Apple’s iPod support page. To my surprise, Apple seems to have removed the step-by-step support options for 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation models.

Then it dawned on me to locate a Firewire cable since iPods of this vintage still shipped with Firewire connectivity as their main method of transferring data. The first iPod model was Firewire only. After the 4G iPod, Apple nixed Firewire cables and has been shipping them with USB2 cables only.

Using the Firewire cable, the iPod came back to life instantly and my friend was stoked.