COME BACK, IPOD

My iPod has been an unexpected fixture in my life this past past year. I still think it’s a frivolous (albeit beautiful) little doodad of plastic and silicon, but, to my surprise I use it all the time. Which is why its recent failure to appear on my Powerbook when I plugged it in was so disconcerting. Complete failure to mount. It showed up in the System Profiler, but no mount point to which I could navigate, no appearance in iTunes. In the process of fixing this, I learned some new things about my little glorified hard drive.

Resetting a b & w iPod (clickwheel)

As described by Apple, you can restore your iPod to factory settings by flicking the Hold toggle on and off, and then holding down on Menu and Select until the iPod resets and you see the Apple logo (about 10 seconds). Good to know, but it didn’t solve my problem.

Reinstalling iTunes and iPod software

Simply running the most recent installers for these two package wouldn’t do it. I’d get to the point where it told me what packages it was about to install, and it would say it didn’t need to install any of them, so it skipped them. I deleted iTunes, any iTunes-related files and folders I could find in /Library/, /Library/Preferences/, /Users/me/Library/, and /Users/me/Library/Preferences/, but to no avail. Finally, I found this page, which described a working solution: under /Library/Receipts/, delete everything relating to iTunes and iPod updates. I’m not sure what these packages are, but I imagine they’re some record of what various OS X updates have installed on your system, and that deleting them makes your computer forget that it’s already installed iTunes.

Restoring an iPod

With all this accomplished, my computer finally recognized my iPod, but threw an error message about incorrect formatting or somesuch, offering to initialize this unrecognized device. Fie upon your initializations, your reformatting, I cried! Instead, I went to /Applications/Utilities/iPod Software Updater and restored from the most recent application therein, which, I’m sure, amounted to the same thing.

Doing all these things finally got my computer and my iPod on speaking terms again, but required brainwashing the poor little iPod. The human analogy would have to be lobotomy as a precondition for reinstating dialog between you and your jilted lover. This, obviously, is not a legally, morally, or sanitarily acceptable mode of social conflict resolution, nor should it be one for resolving digital miscommunication. For shame, Steve, for shame. To add instult to, uh, more insult, removing removing iTunes to the point at which an installer did not think it was still installed proved a Herculean effort of near-Microsoftian proportions. Again, this should not be.