Corrupted 2GB Nano, can anyone help!

[rschader]

I did not find rockbox to try until I tried updating the nano with Apple's latest updates (to 1.1.1, 3/23/2006) yesterday. I ran that updater and thought I followed their instructions, the updater said it was finished and to wait for the ipod to complete it's task. I noticed the nano reboot and thought it was done, but the OS (WinXP SP2) did not want to let me unplug it, and it would not even let me reboot. So I left it in overnight, this morning it was still not done, so I forced a reboot. The ipod does boot, but iTunes does not recognise it, and accessing the ipod from it's own menu shows NO songs in the list, but the About menu says 1.8GB is used. I was able to get as far as loading the bootloader portion of rockbox, but I cannot access the drive portion of the nano from windows to install the main program. I'm afraid the bootloader I extracted from the nano may have already been corrupted.

Trying to re-run Apple's updater program either hangs on initializing OR it reports the nano is being used by other software. Does not matter if I am in E Disk mode or normal mode.

Any suggestions, short of sending it back to Apple?
TIA,
Bob

[rschader]

Also, when I reboot and go back into the CMD prompt to run ipodpatcher again to test which port it is, I get:

[INFO] Reading partition table from \\.\PhysicalDrive2
 Error locking disk: Access is denied.

[mightybrick]

What you can try is this (it will completely erase your ipod):
Download the HP USB format tool here: http://ipodlinux.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10931
Go to your task manager, and kill anything ipod-related (ipodservice.exe, etc).
Reformat your Nano with the HP USB format tool (this seems to be able to access your ipod when nothing else will), then use Apple's updater to update your firmware.  Should be good as new.
I've done this many times when trying to get ipodlinux to work on my Nano.
If this doesn't work, let me know and we can try something else.

[rschader]

Thanks for the tip. I did also find this info on Apples forums after a lengthy search, and another that I used which was to just use the MSDOS format command on it. Although I am not sure what my capacity was before formatting, now it is saying something like 1.8GB when I am supposed to have 2GB! Is that correct?

[mightybrick]

Yah, my Nano even in its original state only had 1.8GB available, the other 0.2GB are reserved for the OS, etc.

[Febs]

The difference is that manufacturers define a "gigabyte" as 1,000,000,000 bytes.  I'll call these "marketing" gigabtyes.

Computers define a gigabyte as 2^30 bytes, or 1,073,741,824 bytes:

1 byte
1 kilobyte = 2^10 bytes = 1,024 bytes
1 megabyte = 1 kb *2^1024 bytes = 1,048,576 bytes
1 gigabyte = 1 mb * 2^1024 bytes = 1,073,741,824 bytes

I'll call this a "real" gigabyte.

So the "missing" space is the difference between "real" gigabytes and "marketing" gigabytes:

2 "marketing" gigabytes/1 "real" gigabyte =
2,000,000,000/1,073,741,824 =
1.86 gigabytes.

[Llorean]

The missing space is also the firmware partition, though that's only another 80mb or so.