iPod Patcher and iPod Loader

The code here is how I successfully loaded Rockbox onto an old video ipod 5th generation in 2024.

High Level Steps

Here are the high level steps:

1. Have an ipod formatted on windows using iTunes (it needs to be fat32 file system)
2. Use "ipodpatcher" to backup ipod firmware (see Makefile)
3. Build the boot loader in order to duel boot ipod os and linux - "ipodloader2" (see Makefile)
4. Copy the boot loader config (./firmware/loader.cfg) to the root of the ipod
5. Copy the correct version of Rockbox onto the ipod mounted file system in the /.rockbox directory.
6. Reboot reboot the ipod (by holding down Menu + Select for 6 seconds) and select either ipod OS or rockbox.

Code and What it Does

The code was "forked" from:

• ipodpatcher
• ipodloader2
• Download the correct Rockbox Firmware archive from the Rockbox website. Note I had to use the nightly build for my ipod video 5th gen.

unzip ~/Downloads/rockbox-ipodvideo-20241102.zip
rm -rf /media/rob/ROBS\ IPOD/.rockbox/
mv ~/Downloads/rockbox-ipodvideo-20241102/.rockbox /media/rob/ROBS\ IPOD/

• reboot it by holding down Menu + Select for 6 seconds.

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Background

I am resurrecting my old ipod, and, while I love the ipod os, it's become a pain to use itunes to sync music in 2024 (apple has moved on to streaming over syncing)

I decided to try to put "rockbox" on my ipod which will let you just drag and drop music files onto the ipod - see: http://www.ipodlinux.org/

Sadly most of the required tools are old, not maintained, or hard to find. The first tool I seemed to need is this tool.

Linux Users

This application seems to still work - so far it at least it compiles, and can see my ipod on Ubuntu 24.04.

Mac Users

Currently this will not compile on a modern Mac (2024). The only reason seemingly being it needs:

-framework IOKit

and the header files

#include <IOKit/scsi-commands/SCSITaskLib.h>
#include <IOKit/scsi-commands/SCSICommandOperationCodes.h>

Which Apple stopped supporting a while ago. I might try to look into this in the future, but for now, you'll have much better luck just getting your hands on a Linux box.

Windows Users

I have not tried windows yet.

References

• https://www.rockbox.org/
• http://www.ipodlinux.org/
• https://www.rockbox.org/daily.shtml
• https://github.com/Rockbox/rockbox
• https://github.com/mguentner/rockbox/blob/master/rbutil/ipodpatcher/
• https://github.com/crozone/ipodloader2