iPod Owners, Beware!

I have a 60G video iPod which is one of my most prized possessions. I am protective of it almost to the point of absurdity. Couple that fact with the knowledge that I have just spent a solid 8 hours of my time repairing, reformatting, and reinstalling thousands of music files to an iPod that crashed big time yesterday and you might see why I decided to warn you guys in advance of a possible problem.

Luckily for me, the iPod that crashed yesterday wasn't mine. Unluckily, the iPod that crashed that wasn't mine, was in my possession at the time the major breakage occured. See, I had a friends iPod because she was seriously lacking in music and I have an abundance. So, I brought hers home with me so that I could beef her music selection up again. I have actually hacked my iPod with a program that allows me to transfer my music to any pc and transfer music off of anyone elses pc to my iPod. Shhhh! Don't tell Apple!

She told me when she sent her player home with me that it wasn't charged. So, I decided the first thing I would do is get it all charged up before I began. I plugged it into the computer and iTunes opened up like normal. But a notice immediately popped up that a new firmware version was available for her iPod. I chose to download it, realizing that my friend is bad with computers and probably had needed to upgrade the firmware but maybe didn't know how. I could do this for her. So I did.

Then I noticed that after the firmware upgrade was complete, her list of songs never showed up in iTunes. So, I disconnected the iPod and reconnected it to allow iTunes to refresh it's connection. Now her songs popped up correctly. But wait, there are little exclamation points next to each song title. I click on one to play it and get a message that the "file cannot be found". ????? So, I click on several more random songs and get the same message. Wow, does she really have this many corrupt songs on here? Where did she get these, maybe she downloaded some corrupt files.

Soon I realize all her files give the same message. I look over at her iPod screen (which I had never done yet) and notice a warning icon on the screen instead of the usual "do not disconnect" flashing message. ????? Apparently her iPod doesn't work right. Something is wrong. I start looking up info on the internet about technical help with iPods and discover that a whole lot of people are having a huge issue with their players right now. Some are unable to find their files (like the one I broke), some are unable to sync up with the pc, some are not recognized by the computer, some give a "read/write failure", etc., etc., etc.

Basically, what it boiled down to is that recently a new version of iTunes was released (Version 7.0) and a new firmware version for the iPods was released (Version 1.2.1). No one is real sure exactly which of the two is the main problem, but somehow one, or possibly both, of these upgrades is causing the players to crash. Yet amazingly, Apple has not yet released any type of fix for the issue their upgrades have caused - or even acknowledged it in any way that I could find. People who were having these major issues were posting on forums from as far back as September that their machines were crashing after the upgrades. I think I finally got the one I broke restored, but it sure did take a lot of work. Don't get me wrong - I'd rather spend hours working on fixing it than spend the money it would have taken to replace it for my friend.

Either way, let this be a warning to you. Do not upgrade your iPod or your iTunes for a while. It could cause some serious damage. And really piss you off. And scare you into thinking you're going to have to spend a lot of money to buy a new one. If your iPod is working, don't try to fix it!