Hacking the iPod

[jbond]

I'm investigating the possibility of hacking a broken iPod into a new home build case with a 2.5" disk drive, a removable battery and RockBox. I want to go to a phat 80, 100Gb or bigger disk and remove the two most annoying parts of the iPod experience. Basically nobody makes my perfect PMP so I want to build my own.

If I can find a 1.8" to 2.5" IDE adapter, can you think of any good reason why this shouldn't work? eg. the bootloaders won't work because some part of the Apple firmware will refuse to talk to a disk > 60Gb? Is there anything inherent in RockBox that will bork at a big IDE disk? Then there's the PSU. Is an iPod likely to be able to power a 2.5" disk?

[saratoga]

It won't be able to power the larger disk most likely (and I would not try), but its easy enough to add a second power supply.  I don't think rockbox will particularly care what the drive size is, but its possible the hardware has some size limitations.

[jbond]

I've done some more research on this. 1.8" drives are 3.3V, 2.5" drives are 5V. So even if I can find the right 1.8 to 2.5 IDE adapter, the ipod won't power a 2.5" drive.

The only reason for even considering this is to try and find a device that a) runs rockbox and b) has a 2.5" drive. The old Archos jukeboxes are hard to find. And to my eyes fairly ugly!  

[Chronon]

saratoga mentioned that you could use a separate power supply for the hard drive.  If the existing power supply can source enough power you could also try a switching voltage regulator to pick up the voltage to 5V.  But saratoga's suggestion is probably your best bet.