This is a tale in progress of a third-generation iPod nearing the end of its life. No, not by my hands. This poor little guy is dying of natural causes: old age.

The iPod is functional currently, but the most worrisome symptom is this very peculiar screen it displayed when trying to sync a few days ago:

I didn’t know what this screen meant, but after a search on Apple’s website, I discovered it is called a Disk Scan Icon. It means that something bad was happening with the hard drive, so the iPod went into a diagnostic mode. The progress bar never moved after 15 minutes, though, so I’m assuming the diagnostics crashed. After a reset, the iPod rebooted normally and worked fine after that.

Before this happened, a few weeks earlier, the iPod started crashing every time it would start a sync. Just a hard freeze. After some fiddling, I figured out that it would work if I plugged it directly into the cable instead of the dock. Once I got it running, I did an iPod restore through iTunes (which wipes out all songs and restores the iPod to its factory condition). Everything has worked fine since then, until the ominous screen above.

Maybe my iPod will die right on time for the release of a multitouch iPod.