Well yesterday Steve Jobs walked out with his black turtleneck and jeans and announced semi-big changes in the iPod line. He announced that iTunes was upgraded to version 8. A lot of new features and some bells and whistles. Along with that, he announced the upgrade of the iPod Touch firmware to version 2.1.

So me being me, I had to have both right then and there. So I open up iTunes and click the Check for Upgrade link and begin the upgrade process. It runs through its usual process and then it got to some section with Quicktime and it stalled. I gave it about 20 more minutes before I shut it down. The Cancel button didn’t work so I had to shut it down via the Task Manager.

Since it had hung so long, I decided to check to see what version of iTunes I actually had at that point. I opened it up and checked: 7.7. But right after doing that, iTunes asked if I wanted to update my iPod’s firmware. Since that was part of my master plan, I said yes. It got mostly through then I got an error message saying that the upgrade could not be completed. I clicked okay and then was told that my iPod Touch was in Restore Mode and was asked if I wanted to restore it. I declined and unplugged my iPod Touch from the computer. I couldn’t go anything with it. It was stuck in restore mode.

I began thinking that I did update it with iTunes 7 instead of 8. So I decided to retry my update to iTunes 8 and this time I was successful. I tried to restore my iPod once again and was told that an unknown error occured. Not good. I now had a $400 paper weight. I tried the restore a couple of more times and was shut down each time. I read some of the support docs that Apple had and tried some things. The last thing I read was to try to restore using a different computer. So I did. And it worked.

Then I went to my regular computer and restored from the backup that was done prior to the bricking my iPod Touch. That took FOREVER but worked. Then I tried the update once again and once again, I bricked it. Thanks Apple.

Today I finally got it all working and upgraded to 2.1 but had to use 2 computers to do it and that just isn’t feasible. I don’t know if I created a weird situation with my upgrade freeze but if you run into this situation, just know that you need to restore to factory settings on a different computer, restore from backup on your computer, and then use that different computer to do the update.

Too much work for an upgrade. So if Apple sees this at all, I might have found a bug in the system that you missed.

Popularity: 39% [?]