Ipod video firmware reinstallation

[tomi]

Hello to all members of this forum,

I recently joined the forum because I need help in  an issue, which I am still not able to resolve. I would also like to give
my assistance to those that might need it.

Anyways, I'm Tomi and am a Visually impaired user of rockbox... I use the voice menus function, something that is a key part of my life with rockbox.
Recently,
I experimented with Ipodpatcher, and somehow, got my boot partition of my iPod video 30 gb messed up. I know,.
But I'm one of those curious programmers, I would try
any experiments that I can think of,
from editing a windows dll file to modifying hex codes in an application. Anyways. So, I
messed up my firmware partition, and my iPod won't boot now.
I tried several methods, which I will describe breefly in this first post:

1.  First, I used cygwin (I don't like the linux kernel, it's not my style) and tried to dd back a video.bin boot loader and a firmware file which I downloaded from the ipodlinux wiki on this topic. In both cases, DD stated an argument error. Here is exactly what I typed into cygwin:
dd if=c:/ipod/video.bin of='\\.\physicaldrive1' seek=63

2. I used something called hp format tool to format my ipod clean.  At the time, I didn't know that this would erase both partitions of my hd!
So, it did. and still at this moment, my iPod has one large 29.9 gb partition...

3. After doing this, I immediatly noticed that iPodPatcher.exe has a feature where you could manually select your iPod and copy a file onto it (manually select a disk). I was really mad at this point. Had I noticed this before, I could of copied the firmware and boot loader on my device.

4. I turned to the Apple restore for help.  I downloaded Itunes 7.1 with my slow dial-up connection, and started it. With sighted help,  I started
the restore thing. After Itunes downloaded the firmware, it gave me a -48 error, saying that it could not download the update.

5. Being a determined person as I am, I used a handy tool called RohPod. My  sister has the same Ipod model, so I backed up her disk and attempted to restore it with rohpod. Rohpod gave a runtime error!

So, here I am with a broken  iPod, a week or so until I go to camp, and no real way to fix it.

Anyone who knows how I can restore my iPod (I use Windows Vista), please respond. I really don't want to go into using linux...
There is no Mac computer I could turn to ; school is out and our household does not own a mac.

Any help would be greatly appreeciated.

Best regards:
Tomi

[Sambolina3]

Have you tried to reformat the ipod using windows by any chance?