virtualbox.org

Hi,

I have the latest virtual box (3.1.2) on ubuntu karmic. As a guest, I have windows xp sp3. On this windows, i run itunes
to sync my ipod. And here is the problem: I never get to sync it.
The ipod shows up in the windows device manager (activated and with most current driver), and it also shows up in itunes, but it tells me that I need to restore the ipod. I hit "restore", it takes a while, then it tells me that itunes encountered an unknown error while restoring, error code 1429. This leads to site that can not be found at apple.

I read the suggestions at http://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=24091 which did not help. I also tried all the suggestions from http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1372.

Now the funny thing is, if I connect to a physical win xp or win 7 computer, everything works fine.

Any suggestions on what else I could do would be appreceated.

Here is what I did to get it working:

First I connected the ipod (classic) to a physical windows machine. There I could restore the ipod. After that, I disabled the ipod option to use the ipod as an external hard drive. After this, I could connect the ipod to my virtual windows box and sync it.

I guess the somehow the "external hard drive" feature of the ipod confused something somewhere between the virtual windows and my linux host.
I am happy now with the way it works. Just out of curiosity I would still be interested on any insights, why I had this problem.

Actually, I was wrong.
When I got it working, my laptop (thinkpad t500) was not sitting in its docking station. When I tried it agagin while the laptop was in the docking station, I got the same error as previously. The error vanished after I had the laptop removed from the docking station. So somehow the dockingstation confused linux/virtualbox/windows.

Any insights?

I think I finally tracked it down.

The actual problem is not the docking station, but the usb hub connected to the docking station. Apple suggests that one disconnects all "unessesary" usb devices, especially hubs. So it seems that VirtualBox works so well that it can even replicate hardware related bugs of itunes. So the real problem is itunes/ipod.