How to recover from a partitioned iPod
A friend of mine decided he
wanted to partition his 4th gen 40 gig iPod for some reason. After doing it, he
was getting the missing OS error image: a flashing folder with an exclamation on
it. Despite his excellent skills with Google's advanced searching, he could find
no helpful info on the web. All he found were people saying to NEVER do
this.
He tried running the iPod Updater and doing a Restore. The first time, it started, then quit with an error message: "05 error". After that, the Updater greyed out the buttons and would no longer recognize his iPod. Further Googling proved fruitless. He sent an email to Apple Support, but got no response other than an RMA box. Fortunately, his wife forgot to tell him about the box until I had a chance to help him.
When you partition a disk in OS X, it creates some very small partitions at the beginning of the drive that are invisible to the user. I discovered this when using a drive that had OS X on it in a PC I was installing Linux onto. At any rate, it dawned on me that the iPod updater was probably trying to put the OS onto the first partition, which would only be 8KB(if memory serves) in this case. Once that partition was full it crashed, then would refuse to do anything else to the iPod since there was no room left on the partition. Now this is a theory based on my prior knowledge and not any knowledge of how the iPod handles partitions and the OS.
If this were true, then we obviously needed to get rid of the current partition table so the iPod could reformat it the way it wanted it to be. So, we opened Disk Utility, highlighted the iPod in the left sidebar, switched to the partition tab, and chose "1 Partition" from the "Volume Scheme" drop-list, then chose "Free Space" from the "Format" drop list, then clicked the partition button.
When it was done repartitioning the iPod, we ejected it, reconnected it, then opened the iPod Updater and chose Restore. About 1 minute later, my friend was putting songs back onto his iPod. You may need to follow this same procedure if you try to replace the hard drive in an iPod as well.
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How to recover from a partitioned iPod
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The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. macosxhints is not responsible for what they say
How to recover from a partitioned iPod
Authored by: cfoster on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 11:42AM
I had a similar problem: my iPod had crashed hard and needed to be restored but restore refused to work (it gave up part way through the process).
It seems that the 'Restore' feature does its best to leave things just as they are, so if you have HFS partitions, it will try to use them, even if they are corrupt some how. I tried to reformat/repartition as HFS but encountered the same problem. SOMETHING was corrupted and sticking around, preventing Restore from working.
I called Apple and was advised that I should take the iPod to a friend's PC and do the restore using the Windows version of the iPod Updater (which will replace HFS with FAT), then bring it back to the Mac and try again.
But instead of doing that I reformatted the iPod as a "UNIX File System" (using Disk Utility) thus completely obliterating any traces of HFS (I figured replacing HFS with UFS would be just as effective as replacing it with FAT -- the point is just to remove HFS).
When the iPod Updater saw it next, it Restored just fine.
[ Reply to This ]
Did you try re-ordering the partitions?
Authored by: sr105 on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 12:44PM
Last time I checked, using mac-fdisk on a Gentoo Linux cd, you can re-order the partitions in the table somehow. I never messed with it, because I couldn't afford to be too reckless. Perhaps, it would have worked for your iPod.
[ Reply to This ]
How to recover from a partitioned iPod
Authored by: ahknight on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 02:08PM
Looks like your friend needs to know how to partition an iPod correctly. :)
He tried running the iPod Updater and doing a Restore. The first time, it started, then quit with an error message: "05 error". After that, the Updater greyed out the buttons and would no longer recognize his iPod. Further Googling proved fruitless. He sent an email to Apple Support, but got no response other than an RMA box. Fortunately, his wife forgot to tell him about the box until I had a chance to help him.
When you partition a disk in OS X, it creates some very small partitions at the beginning of the drive that are invisible to the user. I discovered this when using a drive that had OS X on it in a PC I was installing Linux onto. At any rate, it dawned on me that the iPod updater was probably trying to put the OS onto the first partition, which would only be 8KB(if memory serves) in this case. Once that partition was full it crashed, then would refuse to do anything else to the iPod since there was no room left on the partition. Now this is a theory based on my prior knowledge and not any knowledge of how the iPod handles partitions and the OS.
If this were true, then we obviously needed to get rid of the current partition table so the iPod could reformat it the way it wanted it to be. So, we opened Disk Utility, highlighted the iPod in the left sidebar, switched to the partition tab, and chose "1 Partition" from the "Volume Scheme" drop-list, then chose "Free Space" from the "Format" drop list, then clicked the partition button.
When it was done repartitioning the iPod, we ejected it, reconnected it, then opened the iPod Updater and chose Restore. About 1 minute later, my friend was putting songs back onto his iPod. You may need to follow this same procedure if you try to replace the hard drive in an iPod as well.
______________________________________________
... Email hint • Print hint
How to recover from a partitioned iPod
3 comments | Create New Account
The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. macosxhints is not responsible for what they say
How to recover from a partitioned iPod
Authored by: cfoster on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 11:42AM
I had a similar problem: my iPod had crashed hard and needed to be restored but restore refused to work (it gave up part way through the process).
It seems that the 'Restore' feature does its best to leave things just as they are, so if you have HFS partitions, it will try to use them, even if they are corrupt some how. I tried to reformat/repartition as HFS but encountered the same problem. SOMETHING was corrupted and sticking around, preventing Restore from working.
I called Apple and was advised that I should take the iPod to a friend's PC and do the restore using the Windows version of the iPod Updater (which will replace HFS with FAT), then bring it back to the Mac and try again.
But instead of doing that I reformatted the iPod as a "UNIX File System" (using Disk Utility) thus completely obliterating any traces of HFS (I figured replacing HFS with UFS would be just as effective as replacing it with FAT -- the point is just to remove HFS).
When the iPod Updater saw it next, it Restored just fine.
[ Reply to This ]
Did you try re-ordering the partitions?
Authored by: sr105 on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 12:44PM
Last time I checked, using mac-fdisk on a Gentoo Linux cd, you can re-order the partitions in the table somehow. I never messed with it, because I couldn't afford to be too reckless. Perhaps, it would have worked for your iPod.
[ Reply to This ]
How to recover from a partitioned iPod
Authored by: ahknight on Fri, Mar 11 '05 at 02:08PM
Looks like your friend needs to know how to partition an iPod correctly. :)
Posted: Fri - March 11, 2005 at 09:33 PM
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Published On: Apr 11, 2005 09:20 PM
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Published On: Apr 11, 2005 09:20 PM