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A Guide to Nuking your iPod Firmware

At times, the iPod Updater software alone isn’t enough to get your iPod back up to a running state. This simple guide will walk you through the process of nuking your iPod firmware using Linux and restoring it under Windows.

WARNING: I will not be held responsible for anything bad that may happen to you, your iPod, or your computer.

Let’s go!

1. Start up into your favorite flavor of Linux/Unix
2. Connect your ipod
3. Open a terminal session
4. Run `qtparted` to determine which device node your ipod resides on. (This is usually something like /dev/sda or similar).
   

   Note: this should NOT read hda for your iPod, as those are hard drives.

5. Start up fdisk using the device node that you found in the previous step with the -l option. For example:
   

   fdisk -l /dev/sda

6. Press ‘p‘ to print the partition table of the iPod. It should list sda1, sda2, or similar.
7. Press ‘d‘ to delete a partition. You will be prompted with which partition number to delete. Repeat this for all partitions shown from ‘p’.
8. Press ‘p‘ to view all partition tables again. This should now show nothing for a partition list.
9. Press ‘w‘ to write out the new partition table information to the iPod.
10. Press ‘q‘ to exit from qtparted
11. Disconnect your ipod after qtparted has exited
12. Go back to Windows
13. Bring up the Task Manager and kill any iTunes services and iPod services under the process list (e.g. iPodService.exe, iTunes.exe, iTunesHelper.exe)
14. Plug in your iPod
15. Start up the iPod Updater software
16. Press the Restore button, and confirm the restore process when prompted. Wait for process to complete.
17. Reboot your Windows computer
18. iTunes should recognize the iPod again. You will have to go through the initial setup steps as presented on the screen
19. Restore your music collection and go wild

I hope this helps.