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Help!, Restoring my Iflashed Ipod Classic without access to windows

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HuskyPenguin79:
Greetings!
I have an 80GB iPod Classic (Gen 6) that I replaced the HDD with an iFlash Quad and filled it with four 256GB Samsung Evo microSD cards. I used a friend's Windows PC with AOMEI Partition Assistant, restored the MBR, installed the bootloader and managed to get the RockBox firmware installed. However, when I restarted the iPod, I got the "partition not found" error. Also, I hooked it up to my computer to see if the partition scheme changed, and it did. I don't remember off the top of my head what it was.

Now, I don't want to go bothering my friend again to try and get this fixed. I have a Linux computer running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, and would love some help getting my iPod working again. I don't have the old HDD any more, it was broken anyways.

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

philden:
You could make a Windows partition and use that to re-setup your iPod. I did this on a Mac and used the free downloadable version of Windows. You don't need to pay for basic usage.

rockbox_dev123:
It is 100% possible to format the partition from Linux.


--- Code: ---mkfs.fat -F 32 -S 2048 /dev/sd[a-z][0-9]
--- End code ---

Some rough info is found in step 7 here: https://www.rockbox.org/wiki/IpodManualRestore

I discovered this myself by finding an IRC archive of a conversation where someone explained that you have to change the sector count when formatting on Linux.

I can't find the exact command I used when I last did this but I can confirm that it is possible with the right arguments to mkfs.

If I manage to find the IRC post I'll add it to this post.

HuskyPenguin79:
Thanks for the input!
Update: Just to be sure, I double-checked my partition scheme using the GNOME disks utility, and it shows that it's a 1TB (955GB) Win '95 FAT32 partition with a Windows 95 MBR. Is this one of my problems?

gevaerts:

--- Quote from: HuskyPenguin79 on January 02, 2023, 12:31:13 AM ---Thanks for the input!
Update: Just to be sure, I double-checked my partition scheme using the GNOME disks utility, and it shows that it's a 1TB (955GB) Win '95 FAT32 partition with a Windows 95 MBR. Is this one of my problems?

--- End quote ---

Standard PC MBR (of which "Windows 95 MBR" sounds like a specific sub-type) with FAT32 is what it should be, so that sounds all right.

However:

--- Quote from: bobba_mosfet on December 09, 2022, 06:08:59 AM ---
--- Code: ---mkfs.fat -F 32 -S 2048 /dev/sd[a-z][0-9]
--- End code ---

--- End quote ---
This one is definitely not correct for a Classic. The "-s 2048" is *only* needed or wanted on an ipod video with the original 80GB hard drive. I don't think (I could be wrong, it's been a while) we enable support for anything other than 512 byte sectors on anything other than the Video, so formatting with 2048 byte sectors will likely result in a non-working filesystem.

One thing that *might* be worth double-checking is the sectors per cluster value (on linux, "sudo file -s /dev/sd<whatever-your-ipod-is>" will include that info, there probably are other ways too). Rockbox *should* support up to 256 (which is above what the spec says, so that should be fine), but I do seem to remember issues at the upper end, although that might only have been on the Video with 2K sector sizes. I'd say if the number of sectors per cluster is above 64 (which gives a 32K cluster size), it might be worth trying to format with 32K clusters (so "-s 64" if you use mkfs.fat). This is all very speculative though, and probably based on me misremembering things.

Sorry for not providing much actual help, it sounds like you did everything right (unless you ran that specific mkfs.fat command with -S 2048, in which case, try again without the -S 2048)

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