u/g ipod to compact flash, can rockbox help?

[andymaxwell]

The hdd on my 3rd gen click wheel ipod recently went awol. This is a great opportunity to upgrade the ipod to a compactflash based device. I have been trying and trying to get this done, to no avail. I think it's down to me not having the firmware and not having the cf partitioned properly.
To get to the point, bearing in mind the stated problem getting this working, will installing rockbox be a simple way to get my ipod going again?
 

[bluebrother]

No -- to install Rockbox you need a running Apple firmware. To get the system on the Ipod you can simply use the "restore" functionality in Itunes or follow the ManualConversionToFAT32 wiki page -- it's basically the same when swapping the hard drive.

[scharkalvin]

That's not totally true, but it IS the easiest way.
There are several disk images with partition tables somewhere
on the rockbox site that can be down loaded and copied to the
disk, but you will need Linux to do it.  Since those images are
for the 4 and 6 gb disk partition tables they won't help with a
CF conversion anyway.

[bluebrother]

That's not totally true, but it IS the easiest way.

What's wrong about this? And what exactly are you referring to?

There are several disk images with partition tables somewhere
on the rockbox site that can be down loaded and copied to the
disk, but you will need Linux to do it.

This is not true. While it works best using linux dd is available for windows as well. You might not find any instructions for windows on the site though. It is still possible.

Since those images are for the 4 and 6 gb disk partition tables they won't help with a
CF conversion anyway.

This is not true. First, there are MBR files around for the 3G. Second, the important part is the firmware partition and it being part of the MBR. I upgraded my mini with a 32GB CF card a while ago, and to prepare the CF card I simply wrote the 4GB mini MBR to it, wrote the firmware (as described in the conversion wiki page). After that I simply removed the second (data) partition using fdisk and recreated it to use all available space on the card. Now finally create a filesystem and install Rockbox. Done.

Works flawlessly since several month, and the MBR files were useful for the conversion.