IPod crash

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Saturday, October 1st, 2005

I’ve got an old-school 10MB iPod. With a real mechanical spin wheel. It has served well for several years now. It was annoying that iTunes on a Mac was the only way to get music into it, and iTunes was such a piece of crap for so long. Oh it has always looked pretty, but it took a good deal of fooling with it to bend it to my will. Specifically, it couldn’t deal with an MP3 library that exists on an external file system. It used to insist on copying every lousy file to the local filesystem as part of building its index. My MP3 library is way too big to fit on a tiny iBook hard disk, so I was stuck. A few updates later, it got over that hurdle and I could actually use the iPod. The behavior was unpredictable if I tried to copy too many files to it, and it was even unpredictable if I copied too few files, but since I generally kept it on shuffle, that didn’t matter too much. It was great to be able to have so much variety on my bicycle commute to work.

Exposition over.

Last week, I tried to reformat the iPod so I could fill it from Windows iTunes, which seems to be pretty usable lately. This saga is about my attempts to bring the iPod back to life after plugging it into a Windows machine and allowing the auto-updater to run.

My first search through Apple’s support page got me all sorts of ways to click on my iPod that I never knew were possible and the warning that I would need the original CD that came with the iPod (which Apple doesn’t provide for download). I bought this iPod before a trip around the world and a move from the east coast to west coast. I’m certain that CD doesn’t exist anymore.

But a second search showed me how to get the iPod to come out of its coma, a procedure Apple refers to as “putting my iPod in disk mode”:

  1. Before manually placing the iPod into Disk Mode you should verify that it has a charge, if not you need to either charge iPod before continuing or connect it to power. You can connect it to the iPod Power Adapter which needs to be connected to an electrical outlet or a 6-pin Firewire port on your computer.
  2. Toggle the Hold switch on and off. (Set it to Hold, then turn it off again.)
  3. Press and hold the Play/Pause and Menu buttons until the Apple/iPod logo appears, then release them. This resets iPod. When you reset iPod all your music and data files are saved, but some customized settings may be lost.
  4. When the Apple logo appears, immediately press and hold the Previous and Next buttons until the Disk Mode screen appears. (For iPod Software 1.0 through 1.1, a FireWire logo appears on the screen.) Some iPods will show a “OK to Disconnect” message before you connect it to the computer. This changes to “Do Not Disconnect after connecting.

That got my iPod to be visible to the PC when I plugged it in, and iTunes even started up. I was asked by iTunes what I wanted to call this brand new iPod, although it provided the default name which was what I called it back when it was formatted for MacOS. Then iTunes began to grind away, using about 15% of the CPU for several minutes with the message “Updating iPod, do not disconnect.”

Two hours later, iTunes told me that it couldn’t fit my entire MP3 library on the iPod. Duh. So it asked if I wanted it to pick enough songs to fill the iPod. Not really. I’d rather pick what songs go on it, but there wasn’t really another option. This is the sort of hubris in the Apple interface that makes me so mad.

Another two hours later and iTunes is still copying some random set of MP3s to my iPod. Perhaps by tonight it will be done and I can actually tell it what belongs on there. I can’t be too mad about the slow copy process though, since it is most likely due to the speed of the samba server that contains the library.

Well, it only took about an hour to fill the iPod with random songs. But after disconnecting the iPod from the PC, I had to do another reset to get it out of disk mode. Then after a few tense seconds of staring at the dreaded apple logo, it came to life and is useable again.