2 drives are visible when installed RockBox on Apple iPod Classic 7th Generation

[fallen2109]

After a lot of attempts - I have managed to install RockBox on my second iPod Classic - Gen 7. While everything else looks exactly the same as on my Classic 6th Gen.
I have few questions:

1) When the Gen 7 is mounted (connected to  the PC) I see 2 volumes - namely
             - H: - un-formatted with capacity of 192 MB - Windows offers every time to format it
              - I: - properly formatted and showing the complete capacity of my mSATA (238 GB)
    Is this normal when using the new boot loader v 1.0 ? My other iPod is with emCore and I do not have this effect there (a small un-formatted drive to show before the real
    one).

2) My newly converted (7th Gen) iPod refuses to work via USB 3.0 ports while the one with emCore boot-loader works equally well with both with USB 3.0 and 2.0 ports.

OR did I mess something by deleting all iTunes directories after the successful RockBox installation yesterday ?
Shall I leave all iTunes original folders (directories) on the iPod hard drive ? Or is this of no significance?

Thank you for your concerns and comments in advance.
                                                                                                               

[fallen2109]

Update:

It seems that my iPod board was defective.. After hanging it - the iPod works both via USB 2.0 as well as 3.0.

[Woodentop]

I little late to the party here, but I've also just installed Rockbox to an iPod V7 (160GB) and also see the two drives.

E: 192MB and empty
F: ~148GB contains the hidden iPod_Control folder, the .rockbox folder, and is usable for storing music.

Also Media Monkey sees the E: drive as USB bulk storage and the F: drive as an iPod, so I can't use Media Monkey to sync my music, and have to use a generic file sync program instead.  I tried moving the iPod_Control folder from F: to E:, but that didn't help.

So no big deal, the device is perfectly usable if I just ignore the E: drive.  But still curious if anyone knows what happened here, and whether I followed the wrong procedure.  I used the installer provided, so not sure what I could have done differently.

Thanks.

[Frankenpod]

Have Rockbox on several 7th gens and don't get that happening on any of them.  At least not in Windows explorer or in Media Monkey.  I never had much success with using media monkey for sync to rockboxed ipods anyway - it had all sorts of different problems, in particular being really weirdly slow - so just use drag-and-drop (or, more precisely, a robocopy script).

Not really sure what the cause of your issue is, but maybe putting the ipod in diskmode before connecting might be worth trying?

[Woodentop]

Thanks.

Did you use the Rockbox Utility (v1.4.1) or some more manual installation?

[Frankenpod]

Yup, used the utility.  These are all flash-modded ipods, as it happens.

I'm wondering if it might be that if I looked at them with a utility like AOMEII maybe it would show another partition, but I don't see one in windows...will check when am at home.

[Woodentop]

OK, thanks, maybe the original HDD somehow behaves differently.

I think I'll probably live with it then, since another installation attempt probably means re-installing iTunes to restore the iPod.

Thanks.

[Frankenpod]

Well, I checked, and windows only sees the one partition, whether I connect it in Rockbox mode or in OF disk mode.  But AOMEII does indeed see a second tiny (unlabelled) partition.  Not sure why you get that showing up in  Windows (assuming you are using Windows?)

[Woodentop]

Yes, Win10.  And it shows the same two partitions on two different laptops, so pretty sure it's the iPod, not the PCs.

Oh well, someday I might try re-installing, but it's probably not really worth the effort and the risk of bricking it.

Thanks a lot for checking though !!

[saratoga]

You're both testing on Windows 10 right?  I vaguely remember this being related to some Windows changes after 7. 

[Woodentop]

Both laptops I tried are Win10, yes.

And one of them has never had ITunes or Apples drivers installed.

[Frankenpod]

Also on Windows 10.  Explorer only sees the one partition for me.  No idea why we get different results.
Is it possible to use disk manager to tell windows not to give a drive label to the extra partition?   I remember that you can tell it to give a drive label to a partition that doesn't have one, can't remember if you can do the reverse.