Formatting iPod 6G Classic with iFlash Quad drive in Mac

[jzellis]

OK, so I've looked through these forums and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to do this.

I've got an iPod 6G Classic, with the iFlash Quad installed, 512GB of storage (4x 128GB cards). I'm using an M1 MacBook Pro running Sonoma, no Windows machine available aside from a virtual Windows 11 install with UTM.

I formatted the drive to Fat32 and managed to get Rockbox bootloader installed and the actual software as well.

(Pro tip on this: the secret is to force quit Finder before you try to do it, this way the "iPod Restore" dialogue doesn't pop up and mess up going into DFU mode. It worked like a charm for me.)

Bootloader's fine. But I get the dreaded No partition found message. It definitely has a FAT32 partition and shows up as an external drive in both the Finder and diskutil in the command line.

So I gather that the 6Gs work differently somehow in terms of their partition table and that for some reason I apparently can't format/partition the drive on a Mac. (I find it difficult to believe that there's no command line utility that will do this.) I tried using iPodPatcher but nobody's done a build for ARM Mac architectures.

And I also can't seem to mount the iPod drive in my virtual machine except as a network drive. I barely use UTM and haven't used Windows regularly since about 2002, so I have no idea how the hell you would format a network drive on it or if that's even possible.

Folks, I'm lost here. The information in the manual on how to do this doesn't include the 6G, which is not great, and hunting through these forums to try to find little scraps of info isn't ideal either. Is there a tutorial on how to do it with Linux? I mean, I can install almost any Linux commands on Mac, I think. I'm a web dev and I'm happy as a clam in a terminal, but the info on Rockbox is spotty and spread out and there doesn't seem to be one good tutorial on how to use a Mac to make Rockbox work on an iPod Classic 6G.

If someone can help me figure out the partition problem, I'm totally happy to write an easy to use tutorial myself. I just need help figuring out how to get the stupid partition to work.

Can someone tell me how to do this other than "Get a Windows box lol"?

[jzellis]

OK. I got UTM running Windows 11 on my MacBook, I figured out how to get it to use the iPod as a USB device, I formatted the drive for FAT32 with 32KB unit size using the app from ridgecrop.co.uk, I downloaded Rockbox for Windows and installed everything, but it's still showing no partition. Help!