Rand() Blog

Now here is a very useful hack for all those that think their iPod’s are trashed. If you have a bad hard drive you most likely know what I am talking about. You try to play music, or upload music to your iPod and either it won’t play anymore, or won’t upload and throw back some cryptic error. Or if you are really unlucky you might get the wonderful folder icon on your iPod and it won’t do anything.

For this hack to work however you need access to a linux box, I’m trying to work on a version of this hack for Windows, but at this point in time its a linux hack only. You also need to have a fat32 formatted ipod, I’ve not tried this on a HFS formatted ipod so I can’t gurantee the success. The other main criteria for this hack to be sucessful is that you know your iPod isn’t totally trashed, i.e you’re sure that only certain spots exist on the hard drive that are bad. It is also preferable for the bad spot to be either near the beginning or near the end of the hard drive capacity. Example, you know the first 2gb is bad, but the rest is fine, or the last 3gb of the drive is bad. If its in the middle, well this hack will still work, but you might also end up with only a 5gb ipod. Granted its better than no ipod at all, but you can make that choice.

Warning : This hack does involve formatting your iPod, so back it up before you proceed

Now part of this hack is pulled from Using an iPod with Linux, mostly the parts dealing with formatting the iPod with linux, partitoning etc. Hence why at this point, its a linux only hack, the tools with linux are much more flexible than the ones that come with Windows. So now on to the hack :

Assumptions
I’m making the assumptions that you already have USB/Firewire drivers setup and installed on your linux box, if not, you can refer to the link above and that will help you on your way. I’m also going to assume your iPod is /dev/sda for the rest of this howto.

Step 1) Make a backup of the existing firmware.

% dd if=/dev/sda1 of=backup_firmware

Step 2) Clear out all partitions on the iPod

% fdisk /dev/sda
Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 1

Command (m for help): d
Partition number (1-4): 2

Step 3) Create new partitions

Command (m for help): n
Partition number (1-4): 1
First cylinder (1-1583, default 1): 1
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-32, default 32):
(You want to put in here past the bad spot on your hard drive,
so say the bad spot is 1gb in, you would put here something like +1500M)

Command (m for help): n
Partition number (1-4): 2
First cylinder (1-1583, default 1):
Last cylinder or +size or +sizeM or +sizeK (1-32, default 32):
(Now hit enter here if your bad spot is near the beginning of the drive,
or figure out the best number to put here if the bad spot is at
the end of the drive)

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 1
Hex code (type L to list codes): 0

Command (m for help): t
Partition number (1-4): 2
Hex code (type L to list codes): b

w   [commit changes to disk]

Step 4) Restore firmware back to ipod

dd if=backup_firmware of=/dev/sda1

Step 5) Format 2nd partition for FAT32 filesystem

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -n "My iPod" /dev/sda2

Now in theory you should be able to unplug your iPod and it reboots and does its thing and you should be able to get to the usual menus etc. Now plug it into your usual Windows machine and run iTunes, if iTunes see’s it and tries to update it and do its usual thing the hack worked, and you should be able to continue using your iPod like before, minus of course a couple of GB here and there, but if it extends the life of your pod for another year or so or however long you plan on keeping it without having to shell out some cash for repairs then its a good thing.