Last updated on July 6th, 2015 at 02:56 pm

while keeping all your photos and music!

My daughter’s friend has an iPod with a forgotten the screen lock combination. It had a bunch of photos on it that she’d like to keep too.

So we searched for a fix and finally came up with this simple hack on Windows XP. It should work on other flavours of Windows, and should also work on Linux and Macs.

1. Connect your iPod to a PC and enable disk mode in iTunes. You can also manually put the iPod to disk mode
2. Open My Computer in Windows Explorer and open the iPod drive. In addition to a drive letter it will also be called the name you gave the iPod e.g. Paul’s iPod
3. If you can’t see a folder called ipod_control, enable show hidden files and folders. This is accessed from the Windows Explorer menu Tools > Folder Options… > View tab
4. open the ipod_control folder then the Device folder
5. delete the file that starts with the name _lock
6. Right-click on the iPod drive letter and eject. Alternatively use your normal Safely remove device technique.
7. The iPod is now unlocked but to finish the process, reset it by holding down the Menu and center buttons on your iPod. Once it restarts your iPod is unlocked while all you music and media is still there.

Thanks to 0wxw0 on YouTube for his great tutorial.?Let me know in the comments if you need additional help or just say thanks.