[PLUG] iPod with Linux?

John Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Jul 4 19:10:25 UTC 2005


On 4 Jul 2005, at 12:16, Rogan Creswick wrote:

> On 7/4/05, John Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
> > 
> > While googling I found a page that said that gtkpod would read the
> > files on the iPod if you click on the Read button. Not sure I tried
> > that before. I did just now, with the iPod mounted. It said:
> > 
> > /media/iPod/iPod_Contol/iTunes/iTunesDB does not exist. Import
> > aborted.
> 
> This *really* sounds like you have the wrong partition mounted. 
> Before blowing everything away, you may want to try sda1 and 2 first..
> (apologies if you already have, I missed out on a section of this
> thread).

Good idea. I am pretty darn sure it is sda3, because all the wikis 
and how-tos say that Apple puts three partitions on it, and the one 
the tunes go on is sda3. But I tried sda2 and sda1, and neither 
would mount. To do it I duplicated the line in fstab twice, and then 
just changed them to 2 and 1, and resaved fstab. The commands I 
gave were "mount /dev/sda2" and "-1. I also duplicated it with 
hpmount, but still no joy.

The totally weird thing is that Linux sees only five files/directories 
(and says it doesn't know what they are) -- "Desktop DB," 
"Desktop DF," "Finder," "Readme" and "System." It's supposed to 
see folders like "iPod_Control," etc. Yet while that is what Linux 
sees, when I look at the iPod's display and use the wheel thing, it 
shows exactly the menu choices that it did before I lost the folders.

> FWIW, HFS is also agnostic to case.  It will maintain upper case
> characters, but it dosen't consider iPod to be different from ipod.
> Now, /media/iPod *is* different from /media/ipod, as you correctly
> assumed (because it is the mount point, it is on your linux
> filesystem, not the iPod's file system).

Good point. Unfortunately, fixing that in gtkpod didn't help. :(

> > So now I need to figure out if Linux can format the iPod as FAT32.
> > (I still don't want to install any part of iTunes on my Windows
> > computer, if I can avoid it.)
> 
> When I was working with my iPod, I found a tool that did exactly this
> (I don't recall the name, though :( ).  I don't think you want to try
> and do it manually so to speak, with standard formatting tools.  Your
> iPod apparently has a non-trivial partitioning scheme, and changing
> the wrong partition could be very difficult to undo.

Well, gtkpod seems to have a utility that will place the proper 
directories on the iPod. I haven't been able to use it because the 
iPod filesystem stubbornly remains locked. But it pops up a 
window asking if I want to create a list of directories, and the list is 
exactly what I saw on it before I lost the folders. Actually, I even 
copied those folders off it and saved them to /home/jjj. (Except that 
there were three hidden files that couldn't be copied.)

I'll google on Linux +FAT32 and see what I can turn up.



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