Anyone ever do a Poor Man Install on a fourth generation iPod without changing the partitions on it?

I also seem to be running into some weird BIOS issues when booting with this iPod just connected to the machine. Other USB storage devices don't cause this problem. I was told by techsupport that this was a USB power problem but that has to be a load of hogwash because it works fine with iTunes and as an external HD when it is plugged in after the computer has booted.