iPod 5g Video with new 64Gb CF Card

[CreepingInertia]

Just replaced the old 80Gb HDD in my 5th gen iPod Video with a 64Gb CF Card and ZIF adapter as well as a new battery.

It charges just fine, but iTunes on either my Windows 8 PC or Windows XP PC does not recognize it at all, so I cannot do a restore before installing the Rockbox firmware.

Both PCs wanted to format the CF card, but the Windows 8 machine will not do it at all. I did manage to get the XP PC to format it to FAT32 after downloading a little HP program and did manually transfer the Rockbox firmware to the CF card.

Am I on the right track at all here? Will this work? Do I HAVE to have iTunes do a restore? Should I try installing the bootloader? HELP! Just a bit confused as to where to go from here. Really want this to work, but need some guidance if possible.

Thank you in advance

[bluebrother]

You cannot install the bootloader until you have restored the Ipod. If you don't want to use Itunes there are instructions on the wiki on how to do it manually, but those are for Linux. You could use a live cd for that though. Using Itunes is the easiest way for most people.

[CreepingInertia]

Update:

Success! I guess getting the CF card formatted on my old Windows XP PC did the trick because when I plugged it back into my Windows 8 PC, Windows was finally able to successfully format the card to exFAT. After that iTunes was able to "see" it and I was able to do a restore.

Installed everything using the Rockbox utility without incident. Very excited to get to know this fantastic new software!

Thanks to bluebrother for your help...much appreciated.