Sound The Alarms!
I'm having technical difficulties... With my iPod.

Alright, so maybe it wasn't the best idea to try to install iPod Linux to it when I was pretty sure that it wouldn't work, but I was adventurous, and now, for the past two hours, I've been trying to undo what I did.

My iPod, Saji, a 5G iPod with video 30 GB, was quite the christmas gift from my parents. I totally loved the thing, although in the infinite wisdom of Apple, it's difficult to play video on this iPod with video. As a matter of fact, of the 6 or so file formats that I tried to transfer to the iPod, none worked. I was quite annoyed by this fact, so I looked for a solution on the internet... And what did I come across you might ask? One thing: iPod Linux.

I decided to follow the iPod Linux Installer from a Linux Computer instructions, which was a lot of work, and when I rebooted the iPod, I found that the iPod didn't detect Linux nor Apple's iPod OS. At this point, I hooked the iPod up to my old Windows 2000 box (via a USB 1.1 port... oohhh, so slow) and used iPod Updater to reinstall the iPod OS.

It was at that time when I decided to follow a different set of instructions: iPod Linux Installer from a Windows Computer - but once again, at reboot, the iPod showed an error message saying that it cannot find the OS and I should go to http://www.apple.com/support/ipod: the iPod serious error message. I, having seen this error before (with the previous installation attempt), didn't think much of it, accept that the iPod didn't have a working edition of Linux installed to it.

I tried to rerun the installer to check a few things, but this time, it said that it couldn't access the iPod. And this is where my problems started to take form. I tried to run the iPod Updater to revert to the original iPod OS, but it said that it couldn't mount the iPod. This is bad. I returned the iPod to linux, only to find that linux couldn't mount it either. I decided that it may be in my best interest to install the iPod Updater to my Windows XP machine (which has never been connected to the iPod, nor did it have any Apple software installed to it). When I hooked the iPod up to the XP box, I was able to get the iPod to mount *w00t!* or so I thought.... I told the Updater to revert to the default OS, but as the iPod Updater worked on installing the iPod OS, it once again got the "Could not mount iPod" error.

I again returned the iPod to Linux, this time, realizing something, the reason that I couldn't access /dev/sdb, the iPod device, is because the iPod wasn't on /dev/sdb... It had changed... This connection, it had become /dev/sdd -- it seems that each reinstall of the OS prompted the device to mount under a different device... With this, I decided that I would delete all the partitions and hook up the iPod to my best machine: Suzi-XP. Yes, Suzi-XP (not Suzi-LNX). Suzi-XP is the same computer as Suzi-LNX, just booted into XP instead of SUSE. But even in Suzi-XP, I was getting the same thing as my older XP box, it would allow me to revert, but as it tried to install the original OS, it once again got the "Couldn not mount iPod" error. This is getting annoying.

At this point, I was actually starting to ponder if I could return the iPod to the store to get another one or not. I was thinking, this may be beyond what I can repair... And to me, that is quite odd! A software error is always fixable... Rewrite code, use new code, reinstall the program, etc... There's always a way to fix broken programs, as long as you have the program or the source code, it's possible. But this was just baffling me... And I knew what it was too, something happened when I used the iPod Linux Installer from a Windows Computer... I wasn't sure what it was, but something happened with that installer that freaked the iPod out. I wasn't getting an error that made me think, "Awww hell, the hardware has failed" or anything like that, it just seemed like the iPod was having some serious OS trouble, and I just needed to restore to the original OS to at least get the MP3 abilities back... I didn't even care about the videos anymore... I just didn't want a $300 paper-weight.

I was desperate... But I thought that I really needed access to both a Linux computer and a Windows machine, so I returned to SUSE, and began working with the iPod. A thought occurred to me as I was working with the iPod... What if those Linux partitions are still bothering it? I took a look at my sick little Saji under fdisk, and found three partitions... One marked as none, one marked as Fat32, and the other marked as Linux.

Haha! I thought to myself, that first partition, that's really small, is thwarting the iPod OS reinstall! I figured there are two possibilities... 1) The iPod Updater was trying to install to a partition that was too small or 2) the iPod wasn't reformatting the partition, and wasn't able to mount a partition that was of some "odd Linux format." So, I did what I thought would be the quick-and-dirty way to get my Saji back up and running: trash all the partitions (in Linux) and attempt to run the iPod Updater again.

When it once again received the "Cannot mount iPod" error, I was confused and peeved! The damn thing was still not working. But I quickly came up with another possible solution: what if the iPod needed a file system? The iPod Updater doesn't seem to actually be formatting anything, so I decided to try out installing Fat32 to the iPod in Linux, and then returning the iPod to Windows to see how it worked out.

This time, I got an odd message from Windows: "Drive I: is not formatted, format it now? [YES][NO]" I logged in as admin and told it to format it... Fat32... All one partition. Full format.

It's currently somewhere around 25% and it's been going for about an hour now. There's still a lot of work to be done on this iPod, and I'm still worried about it, but at least it's doing something. More about the iPod coming soon, hopefully good news.

Pleeds with the IT, Apple, and iPod gods