Connecting iPod to an empty PC?

[HBD]

I'm not sure if this is the right forum, but I'm buying one of those Asus Eee PCs, and I'm putting Windows XP on it. There's a fairly easy way to do this that requires a USB thumb drive and an SD card. The SD card is used to make the Eee boot into DOS basically and wipe the Linux distro from it, and the USB contains the XP install files.

I just found out that my USB thumb drive is fudged, only transfering data at like 20KB a second. That's about 3 hours to transfer XP. But, I have an iPod (putting XP on it only took 3 minutes). If I were to attach my iPod to the Eee, after it's been fdisked and wiped clean and sitting at an A:> prompt, would it just read it as a USB drive? Or would it brick the iPod?