Yes, I own an IPOD. The reason I own one is because, at the time, the IPOD, with a whopping 60 gigs of storage plus an MP3 player, hands down beat any other offer in the market in terms of price/megabyte for mobile storage. Flash disks cost/megabyte was way more than for the IPOD, and other MP3 players only came with 4 gigs of storage. So, as I was using my IPOD as a backup devices and a way to transfer files at clients, the IPOD was a compelling offer.

How many times have you reached for the flash drive to find its not there? You left it at home or at the office or its in your other jeans' pocket? Since an MP3 player is like a cell phone and wallet, you always check that you have it before you go anywhere, even if its subconscious, it makes an ideal device to use for storage of files as well.

Anyway, enough of a justification for why I have an IPOD. Being an open source hacker, I didn't leave my ipod as it came from Apple and I installed the Rock Box firmware on the device.  Rock Box is great, because now I can simply drag and drop a folder over to the IPOD folder and thats it. No more reliance on iTunes and having the data stored in a database I cannot access! Plus its real easy to backup music and podcasts!

IPOD mounted in read-only mode

A few months ago I noticed that Ubuntu began to mount the IPOD in read-only mode. This was annoying but since I could get what I wanted by remounting the device in read-write mode I didn't pay much attention. I used the following command to remount the IPOD so I could copy over my music folder.

 mount -o remount,rw /media/ IPOD

I left the problem for several months as I have been too busy to investigate but this weekend I decided to find out what the problem was. It turns out the VFAT or FAT32 filesystem of the IPOD was corrupt and therefore Ubuntu was loading it in read-only mode. At first I tried downloading iTunes to reformat the device, but iTunes just kept on complaining about not being able to contact the Apple update centre when I asked it to restore. There was no reformat option. Since I had no desire to work out why this Windows application was not working I decided to run fsck on the IPOD device.

fsck -at vfat /dev/sdb2

The -a option above tells fsck to automatically fix any errors that it find in the file system. There sure where a ton of them. Some errors fsck could not fix automatically, so I ran the command a second time without the -a option to repair errors. I also deleted a whole bunch of problematic folders before doing this  to avoid having to spend 30 minutes typing responses to inquiries from fsck about what it should do.

Now I my IPOD is automatically mounted in read-write mode when its plugged into my Linux lapto or desktops and i can happily drag and drop my folders in Gnome.