Is a Rockbox'd iPod just not in the cards for me?

[sbcpunk]

Hi everyone,

I'd appreciate some input if anyone has the time. A while back I purchased a 1TB iPod Classic running Rockbox from a seller on eBay. After a day or two the iPod would no longer mount to Finder in OSX. A forum post detailing my troubles can be found here:

http://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,51245.msg236684.html#msg236684

Long story short, I sent the iPod back to the seller and he said at first he thought the problem was the logic board but then he said the battery was not powerful enough and that he would replace the battery and send it back to me. When I got the iPod back it must have just been a completely different iPod. This new one had the red click wheel (like the U2 model) and the connector cable it came with had 2 USB plugs on one end, I guess to give suitable power to a more powerful battery. The seller also said that before he sent the iPod to me he had his friend use it for the weekend and they didn't have any issues with it. I plug it into my computer, it mounts, I add music to it, I eject it, I use it, it all works fine. Later that same day I plug it in again, it mounts, and now as I'm transferring files to it, it unmounts itself from Finder and the ipod support screen comes up on the iPod. I try to restart/reset it every way I can but it never starts up again in Rockbox mode. I was able to get it to start up in disk mode and after everything else I try fails, I decided to try to reformat it myself and reinstall Rockbox, which I fail at. I contact the seller and he offers to refund my money if I send it back, which I did.

My question now is, what is the deal here? I had what seemed to be two different modded iPods fail on me after a very short amount of time. (maybe he thought it was easier to send me a "new" one instead of fixing the old one or maybe he put the original one's guts into a different case, I don't know). He never had any problems when he tested it and neither did his friend. It would seem the problem is me or my computer. Is it because I'm running a Mac? Is there something running in the background of OSX that identifies unlicensed iPods and shuts them down? Or is it possible that this guy on eBay is doing something wrong in how he mods the iPods and installs the software? I really would like to have a music player with 1TB storage that plays FLAC and high resolution files and this would seem to be a good option for me if it would actually work. But I don't want to keep buying these modded iPods and having them fail on me. Is there a more reputable seller I should look into? I'm feeling a little defeated here so any advice wold be appreciated. Thanks.

[saratoga]

You said in that other thread that the apple emergency disk mode didn't even work, which sounds like a compatibility problem with the modded disk.