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View Full Version : Booting off the iPod



iTim
04-21-2004, 10:23 PM
Hi, I am new here and have only used Knoppix a few times. Anyways, I have an iPod and want to find some new uses for it. Since the iPod (the version I have) connects via firewire, I was wondering if it was possible to put Knoppix on the pod's harddrive and boot off of it. If one can do this, how would I go about doing it? Thanks for all the help.

c123
04-21-2004, 11:06 PM
Can your PC boot from firewire (is there an option in the BIOS?) If not you cannot boot off the ipod - when the PC starts up, it doesn't *see* the ipod.

What you can do however, is to boot to a ramdisk, load the firewire modules (drivers), mount your ipod and then transfer the root file system there. So you boot off a CD, but run knoppix off your ipod.

I'm doing this at the moment (with a normal external firewire harddrive, not an ipod). See http://www.knoppix.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=35700 for details.

HTH

iTim
04-22-2004, 03:15 AM
if it works with a normal firewire hard drive, then it should theoretically work with the iPod because all it is to the computer _is_ a firewire drive.

Thanks for the help

c123
04-22-2004, 03:02 PM
if it works with a normal firewire hard drive, then it should theoretically work with the iPod because all it is to the computer _is_ a firewire drive.

Thanks for the help

Theoretically as you say... Depends a lot on the chip used in the external drive, and also what chipset the host controller (in your PC). I've had far too many problems with firewire unfortunately, but I suspect that may be mostly to the implementation on my Dell laptop. Next latop for me will be an iBook I think :)

FWIW the firewire chip used in the ipod seems to be very good (got a 3rd gen 30 GB version), but inserting it into one of the free ports on my external drive crashed my PC the other day :(

Anyway, have fun :)