It all started with my dying 20GB iPod harddrive, which was out of a 2nd gen iPod and then put into a 4th gen. I didn’t use it very often till my DMP3 Car MP3 player died, and i bought the Becker iPod kit for my car stereo. It seems like I’ve shook the drive to death.
Now that a new harddrive based iPod, or a new harddrive wasn’t a solution, I’ve decided to buy an adapter from CF to 1.8″ ATA connector (search ebay, you’ll find some) and a 32GB CF card from PQI (PQI Hi-Speed 120).
The parts arrived soon, but I’ve had no luck with it. I’ve used the standalone iPod software updater, because I don’t use iTunes, but i always get the !Folder icon after my restore attempts. I then realized, that the default setting on my adapter was slave instead of master, but changing that didn’t help. After some research, I found an article, which explained that it won’t work with the hardware revision (820-1525-A) of my iPod. It’s possible to do it manually, but it looked like a lot of work, and since the quality of my adapter didn’t look so good, I’ve decided to go for an iPod Mini, which already has a CF interface.
The Mini arrived some days later, and i was sure that its’ all plug and play from now on, but it wasn’t. I was getting the same !Folder icon as before, no mater if I’ve used the standalone iPod updater on my PC, or iTunes on my PC or Mac. I don’t like to give up on things like that, but after using Ghost and Acronis, to create images of the original Microdrive, and putting them back to the CF card with no luck, i was sure that my CF card won’t work with any iPod, or at least not with the restore options Apple gives.
Now that was a long story, with a short end: Update your iPod with iTunes first, (to version 1.4.1, version 1.3 won’t work), replace the drive, restore using iTunes, and there you go…..