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Hacking the iPod Firmware

Posted by michael on from the void-your-warranty dept.

skreuzer writes "Earlier in the week, someone figured out how to get all the fonts and graphics off the iPod's firmware. Today, Engadget has an article that details on how to mod your own iPod's firmware and display just about any graphic for icons such as power, battery, status, etc."

3 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. BETTER iPod HACKING GUIDE by mbeck145 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Chris Nowak has figured out how to do something the smart people at engadget couldn't do, hack the iPod images without loosing all your songs or data. Check out Chris's article "iPod Hacking". Props to Nowak for coming up with this.

    http://cnowak.blogspot.com/2004/12/ipod-hacking. ht ml

  2. Re:Its only changing some icons & graphics. by damiam · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yes. The easiest way at the moment is iPod Linux.

    --
    It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.
  3. Re:Its only changing some icons & graphics. by macemoneta · · Score: 3, Informative
    True hackers wouldn't need an SDK, they'd just create their own binary and upload it. Uploading is the hard part I suspect if you don't have an EPROM blower (assuming the EPROM in the IPOD can even be removed from the circuit board).

    The firmware is in the first partition of the disk drive, so updating the firmware (from Linux) is just:

    dd if=new-ipod-firmware of=/dev/sda1

    (where sda1 is replaced with the actual device on your system). The iPod expands the firmware and then reboots to use it.

    The only tricky part is that Apple doesn't distribute the firmware file outside of their updater application, so you have to download the Windows updater and then use a resource hacking tool to extract it.

    --

    Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.