Ipod 5.5g stuck in boot loop following damaged rockbox.ipod

[darling1985]

Hi everyone,

I've got an ipod 5.5g (windows formatted) that I've been using rockbox (latest stable) on for a number of years (and love it). The other day I added some new music and updated the database. It seemed to be having difficulties accepting the change so I rebooted the ipod. Upon rebooting I saw the apple logo and got taken to a screen where it claimed rockbox.ipod (I think) couldn't be found. If I plugged in the usb to a laptop the ipod went to disk mode. Windows refused to recognise the ipod and said it needed to be formatted (which would not succeed if I tried) Also iTunes will not recognise it.

I plugged the ipod into a mac and this allowed me to restore it with iTunes and I got the ipod firmware back. When I plugged it into a windows PC again to restore back to windows formatting it was recognised and I restored again. Once restored the ipod is stuck in a boot loop restarting after the apple logo is shown. I repeated restoring with a mac and then windows and ended up in the same situation.

Any ideas on how to get out of this situation so I can get rockbox back on it? In the past iTunes has saved me but not this time!

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Paul

[darling1985]

Update

I've used linux to format the ipod to fat32. This caused the ipod to readily show up as a hard drive in windows and itunes was eager to restore.

Following the restoration the ipod rebooted and the boot loop returned. I don't know why I can restore it to mac formatting and it works whereas a windows restore causes this boot loop.

Paul

[Frankenpod]

Just a suggestion, but maybe if you opened it up and put the drive into an external enclosure you could run checkdisk or something on it, in case there is in fact a hard-drive fault (I mean, even if a Mac can restore it, I think it might still be faulty, just not in a way that produces an error for the restoration process on a Mac - especially if you haven't then filled the drive and fully tested playback.  If it wasn't for the successful restoration on Mac, I'd have immediately suspected a hard-drive problem). 

Also, when its in an external enclosure you could try and format it properly in FAT32 (I'm not convinced you _can_ so format it while its still in the ipod, as I don't think a 5.5 gen ipod lets the computer see the true drive structure).

[darling1985]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll get it out, buy an enclosure and format it.

I was just reading this http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodManualRestore and was thinking of giving it a go.

[Frankenpod]

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll get it out, buy an enclosure and format it.

I was just reading this http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodManualRestore and was thinking of giving it a go.

Hadn't read that page before.  Interesting in that I've never quite understood what the 5.5gen and above actually do to the disk that makes it hard to read outside the ipod.  I still don't quite get it!  But clearly the 5.5gen does something confusing with its sector sizes.