Reformatting 60G ipod video

[yonkiman]

I'm having some problems and I'd like to completely reformat my ipod's hard disk.  I understand I need to use something like Swiss Knife to format at 60GB disk to FAT32, that should be no problem.  But do I also have to do anything to make it Rockbox-bootable after the reformat?

Cheers.

[bluebrother]

There is nothing like "Rockbox-bootable". The Ipod boots off a special firmware partition (using the partition type 0, so it won't show up in Explorer). To make Rockbox run you need to have (a) the bootloader installed, that goes to the aforementioned firmware partition and (b) the main build, which goes to the data partition. Booting, however, is done by the bootloader, so strictly speaking you don't need to do anything to the data partition to boot. However, without the main build you can't run Rockbox.

And as a side note: depending on your OS you don't need special tools. mkfs.vfat on Linux can create the filesystem just fine. Windows refuses to create FAT filesystems larger than 32GB, but that's Windows-specific.

[Chronon]

Of course, if you're on Windows then the easiest solution is just to choose Restore in iTunes.  (Don't do this on a mac or it will format your data partition to HFS+ which is not suitable for Rockbox.)