I’m a mac user, I have been for years. I have a (although somewhat outdated) knowledge of hardware and I’d like to think I know my way around a Unix system. So when I had a problem with my 20gig ipod I figured if it wasn’t hardware I could fix it. Well, it was hardware. My wife got it for me in Feb. of 2004 for my birthday. She got it at best buy, and knowing how I am rough on stuff, she bought the extended warranty from them, giving it coverage till 2/2008. OK, they sent it off and supposedly replaced the drive. Great. I pick it up and take it home. What a big surprise, it’s formatted as a windows ipod. No problem, it should still work. No dice.
Lovely messages in the logs:
Error with partition Bad file descriptor
Erase complete.
Jan 12 07:43:57 Mackie diskarbitrationd[37]: unable to mount /dev/disk1s2 (status code 0x00000047).
2006-01-12 07:44:24.161 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
2006-01-12 07:44:31.198 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
2006-01-12 07:44:34.811 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
2006-01-12 07:44:38.326 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
2006-01-12 07:44:41.870 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
2006-01-12 07:44:45.443 iPod Updater Extreme[500] Can’t read checkpoint data
I can’t find much on these errors while googling around. Damnit. What a pain. It is also making a terrible clicky clack while plugged in. I drag the old XP machine out of the closet and plug it into the PCI firewire card. explorer.exe crashes. OK, I can accept that. This machine is terribly unmaintained. I take it into work and my boss plugs it into his firewire port on his laptop. Same behavior. ::sigh:: I have to take it *back* to best buy. Work and training end and I head off to Best buy.
The Geek Squad guy was nice, not terribly personable (although I wasn’t either when I did that kind of PC repair work). He plugged it into a windows PC using a USB cable and it worked flawlessly. WTF?!? OK. I had my powerbook there. I plugged it into my powerbook with his USB cable and it worked. DAMN! OK, I want to restore it as a Mac formatted disk so if needed I can boot from it. No deal, it needs a firewire cable to do so. I plug it into the PB with a FW cable and it fails miserably. By this point I am super frustrated. Maybe it’s the firewire Dock cable. They say it’s not broken and 5 minutes of me arguing that I can’t use it because I
A. DON’T have a USB cable
and
B. DON’T Want it formatted FAT32
ensues. As far as I’m concerned if I can’t use it it’s worthless to me. It’s an apple product, I should be able to use it as I have for 2 years without issue.
He was not really sympathetic, he’s not a mac user and doesn’t really seem to understand that all I want is for it to be THE SAME as when it was shipped off. Finally after talking to a manager he agrees to send it back with the firewire cable and have it formatted HFS+ and test the cable. OK, another few weeks without it. We’ll see if it works when it comes back. Theoretically, if it gets sent off one more time I should get it replaced with a new one. We’ll see, I’d be willing to bet they fight that tooth and nail.
