Question about using rockbox for audio and original firmware for video- ipod 5g

[Chronon]

Unzipping directly to the iPod definitely works.  But unzipping to your computer and moving the .rockbox folder to your iPod should also be fine.  You don't have to take any special measures to make it hidden.  I think linux automatically hides folders that begin with ".", but you don't have to worry about that.

I also don't think that having a bunch of files or folders in the root of your FAT32 partition should cause anything like the problems that you're seeing.  I hope what you're seeing isn't hardware related.

[mrufino1]

me too! Hopefully with this restart and reinstall, things will work. If not,...!!!!

[cool_walking_]

Also the fsck wouldn't work, it kept saying that the ipod was a directory, and chown didn't work, didn't try chmod.

Do
sudo fsck.vfat -a /dev/sda2
where /dev/sda2 is your iPod's partition with all your files on it. Unmount your iPod before doing this.

The "-a" switch means "repair all errors automatically", as opposed to asking you what to do every time it finds an error.

rockgod24, please don't hijack other people's threads.

[soap]

mrufino1:
What key do you use to shutdown and/or restart your iPod when in Rockbox?

[mrufino1]

to shut down, I hold the play key. To restart, select and play. I believe that is what I read to do- I guess I need to check again, hopefully it wasn't that!

[soap]

No, that sounds fine, though Menu+Select from within Rockbox is not recommended unless your player is frozen, it is very much like pushing the reset button on your computer - an unexpected power-cycle which doesn't give the operating system a chance to save state.
If you want to reboot Rockbox you should shutdown with a long press on play and then power back on with the Select button whenever possible.
I was just curious if you were constantly Menu+Select rebooting your player and never allowing Rockbox to store a .cfg file...

[mrufino1]

This all happened again, and now I am running fsck.vfat, following a post from the ubuntu forum about using it on an ipod- it seems to be stuck though, how long should that take? It worked once, and I may have repeated what I did (it was fixing things again though). Is running this checking for disk errors and blocking off bad sectors? This time I caused the problem in one of several possible ways- My ipod has not been mounting every so often, and putting it in a windows machine and ejecting it from itunes solves that. But I noticed it was showing up in /media/sda2, so I would load things on then reboot the ipod to disconnect- probably not what I should have been doing. Also, I was trying to save a playlist in rockbox earlier, and that is when it crashed- first it said that the playlist directory was gone, then when I rebooted the dreaded black screen showed up. SO, to sum up, if fsck.vfat works, is my disk now healthy and if I reformat will everything hopefully work as it should? Thanks a lot, sorry to be such a screw up-Mark

[Chronon]

Yes, rebooting the iPod while mounted to a USB port is not a good idea.  That's definitely a good way to generate filesystem errors.

If you're planning to reformat then I would probably not run fsck.vfat since you'll be generating a new filesystem anyway when you format the drive.  If fsck.vfat detects and fixes all of the errors in the filesystem then a format may not be necessary.  But formatting is a surer way to fix your filesystem woes since you're building a new one from scratch.

[mrufino1]

For some reason my ipod randomly mounts under ubuntu, but if I put it on a windows computer and eject it from itunes it then mounts fine. This is now the third time I am having to reformat this though, I'm not sure why this keeps screwing up. the fsck seems stuck. When I run it, it does its thiing, then I get my prompt again. When I enter sudo fsck.vfat -a /dev/sdd2 to automatically repair the filesystem, it goes through some things, then for a bunch of files with strange characters it says Truncating file to 0 bytes, then seems to just sit there. I unplugged it one time and it said I/O error, does this step just take a long time and appear to be inactive or is there something wrong? Thanks-Mark

[Chronon]

I'm not too familiar with this specific tool, but I could imagine that a badly broken filesystem could cause some problems or make it take much longer to execute.  How long have you let it run?

[mrufino1]

It has been running for about 15 minutes on this try, but there does nto seem to be anything happening- the hard drive light on my computer is not doing anything. Maybe autorepair does take a while. My concern is that I have to leave and my laptop (where it is currently connected) has some overheating issues, so if I leave it I may come home and it will have shut down (but then again , maybe not- it is unpredicatble). I guess I have no choice but to try to leave it running and check tonight.

[Chronon]

I have no idea what state your file system is in.  If it is very badly damaged you are probably better off reformatting and going from there.

[cool_walking_]

If you do a format, I would suggest doing a bad block check as well. This will flag any physically damaged parts of the disk as "out-of-bounds", and make sure nothing gets written there.

[mrufino1]

How would I go about doing that? Is that a utility in itunes when I restore the ipod? That probably sounds like it is what is needed, and what I thought the fsck was going to do.

[cool_walking_]

D'oh, sorry. Just add the "-t" option to fsck.vfat - i.e. sudo fsck.vfat -at /dev/sdd2

Yes, the command can take a while.  The bigger the hard drive, and the more things wrong, the longer it takes.

If you're in a hurry and it's still going, you can interrupt it with ctrl-C.