Fun with gtkpod on FC-13

Connected my Ipod Video to my FC-13 machine. It was immediately detected and mounted. Fired up gtkpod and got the file listing without hitch. Made a few changes by adding and deleting a few songs. This too went ahead smoothly. I then quit after saving changes,

After the ipod was unmounted and detached from the USB port, all the songs had DISAPPEARED! But the available space indicated that the files were in there somewhere. Plugged it bak into the USB and gtkpod faithfully listed all the files.

Went back to Itunes on my Vista laptop. Initially vista would not detect the ipod. I reset the ipod while it was still plugged into the USB. Then it got detected. Started itunes, first and foremost updated to the latest firmware version 1.13. After the new firmware got installed, the ipod did a self reset. iTunes then displayed all the songs without any loss.

Did a thorough research on the net and found that in order to not mess up the ipod database the following has to be done before first time using gtkpod:

1. Plug in the ipod into the USB.

2. Open a terminal window. Become superuser by "su -" command.

3. Run command "mount" You can see the mount details of the ipod.
This line will have the actual name of the ipod and its mount
point usually in the /media folder. We need two values from
this line. In my case they were "/dev/sdb2" and "/media/STEVE".
STEVE is the name of my ipod. The first value is the device
associated to the ipod and the second its mount point.

4. Run the command:

/usr/bin/ipod-read-sysinfo-extended /dev/sdb2 /media/STEVE

Replace the two values as per the result of your "mount" command.

5. Unmount the ipod and replug it. Now you can run gtkpod safely
to file manipulations in the ipod without making the files disappear :-)

I found http://gtkpod.wikispaces.com quite useful in my quest to restore my ipod without losing anything.