My 7th gen iPod with iFlash dual no longer shows up on iTunes

[Psychotronics]

My iPod had a dual sytem on it: the original firmware and Rockbox. I used Rockbox for playing music and the OG firmware when adding songs to the device.
A few days ago, it simply stopped playing songs. Anything I tried to play would skip and I couldn't update the database anymore. After a while, I decided to do a clean reinstall. I ran into more problems: iTunes wouldn't recognise it, Windows 10 and Windows 11 were unable to format it for some reason, so I had to use the AOMEI Partition Assistant to wipe everything and start fresh.
After doing that, iTunes no longer recognises the iPod. I managed to install Rockbox, but if I plug it on my computer it does nothing. If I press and hold menu+select to try and enter recovery mode, the screen goes dark and it doesn't show up on my PC.
Are there any ways to reinstall the original firmware on it besides iTunes?

[Frankenpod]

First thing I'd try - put it in diskmode, then see if iTunes can see it and restore it (it worked for this guy)

https://forums.rockbox.org/index.php/topic,54894.msg253832.html#msg253832

Second thing I'd try is taking the cards out of the ipod and reformatting them individually as FAT32 with AOMEII in a card-reader, then putting them back and trying again.

When you say you used AOMEII to wipe everything, do you mean you deleted the partition with it, and then created a new FAT32 partition?  Did you also try rewriting the MBR?


(It's also possible you hit a bad sector on one of the cards - had that happen once when a card went bad, had the same effect you describe...you could use AOMEII to check for bad sectors in each card in a card reader, but that's a really tedious time-consuming process).