error -4 after update and how to uninstall old bootloader?

[spadger]

I recently tried to update my ipod 4th gen grayscale by downloading and extracting the file and folder rockbox.ipod and .rockbox to the root of my ipod to overwrite the existing versions.

Upon rebooting the ipod i recieve the error "-4" and it continues to boot the default apple firmware. i had saved a copy of the old firmware on my pc (.rockbox and rockbox.ipod) which i transferred back to the root of the ipod, but i still got the same "-4" error.

I understand that since my original installation (23/10/2006) using linux there has been some updates to the installation procedure and now there seems to be an ipodpatcher version for linux, which wasn't the case at the time i performed the original installation. There was at that time a tool called ipod_fw.c .

I would like to uninstall rockbox so that I can start again fresh with the most recent bootloader/firmware. Thankfully I saved a copy of the manual locally at the time of original installation (01/11/2006) but this only details uninstallation using the ipodpatcher tool which at that time was only available for windows and mac so therefore i didn't download it. Even so the uninstall command seems to be different for the new and old version of ipodpatcher

old version:    ipodpatcher -w N bootpartition.bin

new version:    ipodpatcher N -d

My question is/are:

is there a simple solution to this problem?

if not how do i uninstall the old rockbox bootloader as the two apple and rockbox bootloaders seemed to be "merged" during the installation.

can i use the current ipodpatcher tool to remove the old bootloader or will this risk removing the apple bootloader/firmware at the same time?

Sorry this is such a long one but I would appreciate any advice/help anyone could offer.

Cheers,

J.