spartan,
Those scripts above are only for automatic mount/umount. Device driver should be loaded automatically without those scripts.
So, when you plug in your iPod, try lsmod command to see if usb-storage module is really loaded. If it doesn't show usb-storage, it means iPod is not Linux usb-storage compliant. Sorry, I don't have iPod myself, so don't know the detail.
If you can see usb-storage, then try the below to see what it shows. Note that Linux treats USB mass storage as SCSI device.
# fdisk -l /dev/sda
If you can see the disk, then you may be able to manually mount it.
mount -t vfat -o umask=000,noatime,iocharset=utf8,codepage=932 /dev/sda1 /mnt/usbhdd