Potentially Bricked iPod

[Lunaluu]

I recently installed Rockbox on my iPod Classic, and in a rather stupid move decided to format the second, blank/unformatted drive that shows up when I connect it to my PC. After a little while I went to uninstall Rockbox temporarily and format the iPod using iTunes, yet I found that the software wouldn't recognize the iPod. Instead of playing it safe and installing Rockbox again, I formatted the iPod completely. iTunes can tell there's an iPod in need of recovery now, when I actually have it start the process, it tells me that "An iPod has been detected, but it could not be identified properly. Please disconnect and reconnect the iPod, then try again." In addition, it shows error code 1675. The iPod itself no longer shows anything on the screen, nor does it appear in file explorer.

I don't know how I got to the thought process I did, but I would greatly appreciate any kind of help in getting it working again, if that's possible at this point.

[Frankenpod]

Don't really know what's going on with your ipod, though had endless issues like this when getting flash modded ipods going.  Have really come to hate those uninformative iTunes error messages (especially the "an unknown error has occurred" or the "ipod needs to be restored" loop).  Haven't seen such issues arise with the original hard drive, to be honest, except when it was physically failing.

Are you putting the ipod in recovery mode? (i.e. hold down centre button and menu button for 10+ seconds when it's connected to the PC).

Are you saying the ipod itself goes 'dead' after you attempt restoring?  I've had that happen with those flash-mods as well, requiring the battery to be disconnected and reconnected before it comes back to life.  It's possible the hard drive is failing.

[Lunaluu]

I've tried putting it into recovery mode a few times, and nothing happens on the iPod or the PC.

The screen doesn't show anything no matter what button combo I attempt, and the drive doesn't spin up either. The hard drive most likely isn't the issue, due to the fact that it worked perfectly prior to installing Rockbox. I believe the issue is that there's nothing bootable on it - no Apple firmware, and no Rockbox; even the bootloader was removed after I formatted it. I am by no means an expert on this, but I don't believe that removing the software would kill the drive.

[Frankenpod]

Still not clear on what exactly you say is happening.  When you try putting it in recovery mode, what do you mean by 'nothing happens on the ipod'?  It doesn't reboot, show the apple logo, then go blank again?  Does it just not reboot at all?  Or it does the reboot but then goes completely dead with a blank screen?

Can you boot it into disk mode?  (reboot with centre+menu then reboot with centre+play)?

[Frankenpod]

When you say you reformatted the ipod completely, how did you do that?
I've found (when trying to get flash modded ipods functioning) that reformatting the thing with AOMEII (as FAT32) often helps with then getting iTunes to restore it.  Maybe you reformattted it with Windows and it's no longer FAT32 formatted (e.g. NTFS instead), so it might help to do that.

[Lunaluu]

When I tried recovery mode, it wouldn't do anything at all - no disk spinning, nothing on the screen.
I just tried getting it into disk mode, and fortunately it was able to boot. iTunes immediately recognized it as corrupted and I got it working again.
When I had formatted the iPod, I simply used the format tool in file explorer. I never considered that it'd have to be formatted to FAT32.

Either way, it was thankfully able to boot to disk mode and I recovered it from there. I had never even considered trying that, so at least I know now that's an option. Thanks for your help :3