Yeah, this one is seriously frustrating me. I'm just venting now, it's not really anything important, I have multiple mutli-terabyte working ipods already - I just wanted to make some use out of these surplus memory cards I had left over. But don't think it's going to happen.
What really bemuses me is the sheer variety of different errors I get - it's like a constant deluge of them - e.g. if I do manage to restore it with iTunes it comes back and iTunes immediately says it's now corrupted and needs to be restored again.
By restoring the ipod twice in succession I managed to get it working with 475GB (which is less than it should be, but never mind). But then when I tried to write to it it was _incredibly_ slow, and event manager revealed it was making huge numbers of 'disk errors'. Concequently got a lot of file corruption and then the thing later went back to 'red cross' mode.
When I earlier gave up on this 7th gen logic board and tried with the same iFlash and cards but in a 5th gen, syncing was so slow it would have taken 91 hours to do a full sync! 5th gens are slow, but not _that_ slow. I suspect if I'd looked at the event manager I'd have seen all those disk errors again.
Half the time iTunes doesn't recognize that the ipod is connected, and if I put it in DFU mode windows notices it's attached but iTunes still doesn't see it, and the ipod screen goes black and it never comes back on again, until I completely disconnect the battery and the iFlash and reconnect them. I managed to rockbox it at one point, but now I can't get the rockbox bootloader off of there again, because of that problem with the PC thinking another program is accessing the card if I put it in a card-reader.
(Incidentally, for the ipod classic, is the bootloader stored on a partition on the disk/iflash or is there an additional small amount of flash memory on the logic board somewhere? Anyone know?).
I tried it with just a single 128gb card in there, and iTunes restored it and then claimed it was a 30gb capacity iPod!
I've tried with multiple different configurations of the cards I have (4x128gb, 3x200gb and 1x16gb) swapping the order of cards, and reformatting them, and nothing works. Most of the time when I try to reformat them in a USB card-reader I get the 'partition table is locked by another program' message.
All these cards were originally from Amazon, directly, and all previously worked in other ipods. They aren't fakes. Unless they've 'gone bad' with all the endless card-swapping, I don't see it can be the cards that are faulty. Though I have not got the energy to retest them all with h2testw - and besides I have that problem of the PC constantly thinking another program is accessing them.
Also tried a dozen different ipod drive cables (long time ago bought a big batch of spare ones)
So it's either the logic board of the 7th gen (but then, I also had problems with the same iFlash and cards in a 5th gen) or it's a fault with the iFlash itself.