iPod7702004-04-30T08:48:00-04:00$Date: 2005-09-11 10:27:02 -0400 (Sun, 11 Sep 2005) $NormanWalsh2004Norman WalshA new toy! A war story. And something I have in common with someone genuinely
famous.StevenLevyThere has never been an unexpectedly short debugging period in
the history of computers.As I
mentioned before,
my plan when I sold off my old iPAQ and its
accessories was to buy an iPod (irrespective of the odd naming coincidence).
And that’s what I did.
The iPod is a sweet little gadget. Now my music plays smoothly no matter how much load
my laptop is under. I tried to keep the HFS+ filesystem on it;
I built a kernel with the right options and got the appropriate modules in place.
But, clumsily, I managed to corrupt the filesystem before I had had the sense
to back it up so I had to
convert it to the Windows filesystem. (There’s no fsck for
HFS+ under Linux yet.)The
Belkin widget
for copying images of a CompactFlash card works perfectly.
That’s the part that I needed before we go
on vacation…tomorrow. So you’d think
I’d leave well enough along, wouldn’t you?But no, I’m curious to see how the iTunes music store works now that I have
device that will play the DRM’d tunes. So off I go under VMware to install iTunes.
Up and running, I plug in the iPod (good thing I bought that USB cable). I’m
told to upgrade the iPod, which I agree to do with some trepidation.Part way through it gets totally wedged. Or maybe I was impatient, but I
waited a long time. Whatever. The iPod reboots…and hangs.
And reboots…and hangs. It doesn’t even get far enough in the boot sequence to
be recognized by my laptop as a device. Panic sets in.
(DebWalsh brought me some relief by pointing out that we could
bring a laptop along, so I wouldn’t be totally $#@*/?%!ed with respect to
our vacation photos. Thanks, sweetie.)I’ve completed about half the online forms (kicking myself the whole time)
required to send an iPod in for
repair when the adrenalin begins to subside and I realize two things (1) I haven’t
asked Google for help yet and (2) no sane engineer builds one of these devices
without some sort of debugging mode. I bet if I hold down the right keys, I’ll
get something.With great relief, Google leads me to
“Troubleshooting
Your iPod” and I manage to get the thing booting as a disk. As I’d made
a backup of the firmware as part of the transition from the HFS+ to Windows
filesystems, I’m able to get it working again.Bouyed by relief and optimism that I can recover if it doesn’t work, I try
the upgrade again and this time it succeeds.The only reason I bothered to tell this whole story, by the way, is that
the
same thing (more or less) happened to Neil Gaiman. I’ve
written about him before.
I wish we had something more pleasant in common.Anyway, this is likely my last post for a week or so. We won’t
chat again until I get back from vacation, unless, per chance, you
happen to have plans to be in St. Thomas in the USVI next week :-)