virtualbox.org

I'm using Linux Mint 9 and was wondering if i could use virtual box to run Windows and iTunes to upgrade my iPod Touch's firmware?
If so, would i lose all of my music seeing as it wouldn't be in the iTunes library?

You can update the firmware just fine, I did the same with my iPhone. You do need to install the latest iTunes, version 10, as other versions between 9.0.2 and 10.0 don't work in VB unless you enable hardware virtualisation and can use it.

Of course, as with any iDevice, everything not in the iTunes library will be lost when upgrading on a different system. If you want to keep your music, you have to add your current library to iTunes.

I tried to synch my iPod shuffle last night using VB 3.2.8 on XP guest on a Ubuntu 10.04 host, and it couldn't seem to deal with it, so after an hour I gave up. Synching the same iPod on Windows 7 took about 10 minutes.

There was a bizarre error relating to Windows not being able to write a large file, although it did not say what the file was or where it was trying to write to. Any thoughts? Anybody had similar issues?

cSquall wrote:I tried to synch my iPod shuffle last night using VB 3.2.8 on XP guest on a Ubuntu 10.04 host, and it couldn't seem to deal with it, so after an hour I gave up. Synching the same iPod on Windows 7 took about 10 minutes.

There was a bizarre error relating to Windows not being able to write a large file, although it did not say what the file was or where it was trying to write to. Any thoughts? Anybody had similar issues?

Are you sure the failed upgrade wasn't due to the iDevice changing mode that cause VB to loose it?

You could be right --- it looks like the device changed modes and needed to do a restore first. Per the directions and your previous comments, this is when the default USB filter (with no shown device) would be needed, right?

Yes, you could use an empty filter for that. But if you want to stick to just one filter for your iDevice and thus making sure that no other newly attached device goes to the VM unwanted, you can use the following filter example that I use for my iPhone: As you can see, I cleared the VendorID, the ProductID and the Serial Number. This will capture my iPhone when it goes to recovery mode for installing the firmware.