Comment 8 for bug 456996

for me, i solved the problem by letting hal ignore the first partition of the ipod.
first, you need the label of the partition (replace '/dev/sdb1' by the device your ipod uses):
# lshal -u `hal-find-by-property --key block.device --string /dev/sdd1` | grep volume.label
   volume.label = 'iPod' (string)

create a fdi file in /etc/hal/fdi/policy/, e.g. ipod-ignore-firmware.fdi:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="volume.label" string="iPod">
      <merge key="volume.ignore" type="bool">true</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>
replace "iPod" by the label you got with lshal.

at last, restart the hal daemon:
service hal restart