Maybe OT - formatting ipod drive

Thomas Cameron thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Tue Feb 6 07:25:07 UTC 2007


All -

I got an new 80GB video ipod and tried to sync it using gtkpod.  I had to 
shut down to make a plane and the sync crapped out.  I've formatted my 
older 20GB Ipod's disk a number of times under Windows with no problems, 
this is basically what the Ipod reset programmer does.

Well, I tried to mkfs.vfat /dev/sda2 and I could no longer mount it - I 
got an error saying "kernel: FAT: logical sector size too small for device 
(logical sector size = 512)"

So I went back and played with mkfs.vfat and came up with this:

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -S 2048 -n IPOD /dev/sda2

This seemed to work just fine, leaving 75 or so gigs usable.  For grins I 
tried:

mkfs.vfat -F 32 -S 32768 -n IPOD /dev/sda2

The Ipod would not boot at all, just kept power cycling.  I put the Ipod 
into Disk Mode and I was finally able to reformat.

So my question is, does anyone know what the "best" logical sector size is 
for the 80GB Ipod?  Or can anyone tell me what the sector size of their 
unreformatted 80GB video Ipod is?

Thanks,
Thomas




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