Odd OSX nano 1st gen disk mode issue ...

[rachaelnex]

Hello rockboxers.

Ok, I want to say right off that I am severely visually impaired but pretty computer savvy. I've looked through the forums but I can't find anything that talks about this exact problem. So here goes.

I installed rockbox on my 1st gen nano over the weekend. I love it, it's fab. Last night I let my nano put me to sleep playing quietly in the background as usual. As usual this morning the battery was pretty much flat. So I plugged it into my macbookpro (running the latest version of OSX Tiger with all the updates installed) to recharge. And recharge it did. Then wierdness happened - the nano began to repeatedly reboot- it seemed to go dark to the apple screen, go to the rockbox startup splash screen, then report some very small fonted error message that I couldn't read, then do that all over again. Whilst still connected to my mac. Eventually it stopped doing it (I looked on it with horror at this point not sure what to do) and just hung there doing nothing. If it said an error on the screen I couldn't see it (but as I said, eyes are not great so that doesn't mean there wasn't an error being displayed !) So I ejected it and unplugged it. It must have reset itself then.

It shows a nearly full battery charge now and I can use it fine, everything seems to be ok within the ipod itself.
However, the nano no longer appears in the OSX finder pane as a removable drive when plugged in via usb. It doesn't appear on my imac either when I plug it in there (I tried just to see if it was my macbookpro having a fit). Needless to say it did appear on both yesterday and all over the weekend. I've tried putting it in disk mode before plugging the cable in (cable to the computer first and also cable to the ipod first, both ways round), no joy. I've tried resetting it and then putting it in disk mode, still no joy. So I rebooted it into the apple firmware to see if it would show up as a drive when connected by usb and guess what, no joy.
Interesting thing though - if I reboot my macbookpro into XP, it DOES appear in XP as a removable drive (but this is a bind because all my music is on my osx partition and thus I'd have no way of putting any more music onto it if I used XP to connect it.)
The other thing is - itunes on either OS tells me the ipod is corrupted and needs to be restored. Is this, and then a reinstall of rockbox and a backup and reinstall of all my lovely .talk files for talkbox, the only way to fix it, if that will fix it at all (hoping desperately !) ?

I don't think it's a hardware issue, i.e. my macbook pro has a usb problem, because it doesn't show up on my imac G5 either as I said. It appeared fine yesterday, and now it doesn't. I fear an ipod issue.

Any ideas folks ? Many thanks.


Rachael

[LambdaCalculus]

You can try doing a restore with iTunes and see if that'll clear these symptons up. Just make sure to format your iPod to FAT32 afterwards!

Keep us posted!

[rachaelnex]

You can try doing a restore with iTunes and see if that'll clear these symptons up. Just make sure to format your iPod to FAT32 afterwards!

Keep us posted!

I was afraid you'd say that. But thanks for replying anyway !

If I do that I'm right in thinking that everything, rockbox, music, .talk files and all will disappear and I'll have to start all over again, yes ?

If I did do that, as the ipod shows up in OSX itunes too, should I use osx itunes to restore or XP itunes ? Is there any difference to what may happen afterwards (i.e. the possibility of this happening again) I wonder, in this case ? Though presumably does the XP version of itunes format said ipod to FAT32 anyway when it restores so I'd at least get to skip that step in the whole "starting over" process ?

[LambdaCalculus]

Do you have a USB thumb drive? Back up your entire nano through
Windows, and use Windows iTunes to restore it. At least with the thumb drive, you can just drop everything back into the play through MacOS X, and just reapply the bootloader to the nano, and off you go!

[rachaelnex]

Yes, I do have a thumb drive and luckily it's a 2GB one so no issues with lack of space (as my 2GB nano is not quite full but getting there) - neat idea !  8-) Thanks for the tip.
I have read in the forums that if there's a usb corruption / issue then it's nothing to do with rockbox as it has little or no usb code in it, so I won't be backing up a bad configuration only to apply it again after the restore, am I right ?

Right, I'm going to back that sucker up right now, before anything else can happen ...

[LambdaCalculus]

No, I don't think you should be backing up a bad config, but to be on the safe side, clear your config when you start Rockbox back up; just click the hold switch when the backlight comes on at the Apple logo.

[rachaelnex]

Well there's good news and bad news for my nano:

The good news is, it's now fixed. Restored through xp itunes and now it shows up in osx finder.

Bad news is, when I went off to back it up before I restored it through xp itunes, it was no longer readable as a removable drive through xp (it had been merely minutes beforehand). It showed up in explorer but when I tried to open it an lovely little happy message said the drive was not formattted, would I like to format it now, blah blah. So I had no choice but to do that as it wasn't showing up in itunes as needing restoring by that point either. It seemed to be getting sicker and sicker.

So I formatted it, then was able to restore it through xp itunes, it showed up in the osx finder and I'm now rebuilding the whole thing. Rockbox and associated things now installed, now I'm slowly transferring music to it.

I think the moral of this story is (for me anyway) back it up once you've got it how you want it, in case of disaster.

Thanks for the advice LambdaCalculus379 ! The thumb drive tip is going to go in my mental file in the "must do for ipods" section. I back up my mobile phone, my pda, my multi function touch screen remote control (gadget girl, who me ? ), and of course my hard disk. Never thought about backing up my ipod whether rockboxed or not too. Doh.

[saratoga]

If you restore an Ipod on MacOS, you get HFS.  Thats why you needed to do it on the PC.

[rachaelnex]

If you restore an Ipod on MacOS, you get HFS.  Thats why you needed to do it on the PC.

Yes, I'm aware of that
 I was wondering (further up the thread before the point was made moot) if getting it to play nice with osx (as I see from the forum threads that sometimes that can be an issue) would be better served by restoring it from an osx version of itunes then formatting it to FAT 32 in xp afterwards (as opposed to doing it straight in xp and not needing the extra formatting step as discussed).
Sometimes such obscure seemingly inconsequential steps seem to perform some sort of magic ju-ju that nobody can explain (or as we used to say in the IT support business the 'Who Knew ?¨ factor. I was hoping someone else might have had the same problem and would pop up and say ye or nay on that idea, but nevermind, it's fixed now.

[LambdaCalculus]

I'm glad to have helped you out.