Sunday, May 07, 2006

Laptop dead

Which is fine, as it's still under guarantee, and my old laptop is over at Matt's, and everything's backed up on the iPod anyway. So it was with a sense of almost-slighly-smug satisfaction that I plugged the iPod into the old laptop, only for it to make an odd whirring noise, then wipe itself.

See previous:

Posts
comic

and I don't know what.

Argh.

However however however... looking at the settings bit on the ipod screen (the old laptop won't even recognize it), I see that though the capacity is 37.2 GB, there is only 18.4 GB 'available'. Does this mean the backup stuff is still on there somewhere? Hmm... shall investigate.

11 comments:

Rose said...

My iPod is looking for a new harddrive. Apparently loading up the entire Pink Floyd back catalogue is not the thing to do if you want an iPod to live.

Shiny, yes.
Worth the hassle/cost? Probably not.

Anonymous said...

If you turn on Enable Drive Access in iTunes you'll be able to wander around the iPod in My Computer without much pain, but you'll probably need to show hidden files in Explorer too.

Odd that old laptop won't recognise it though, even as a Mass Storage device ("disk" to everyone else).

James Moran said...

When you connect the iPod, iTunes automatically synchronizes the music library, which means overwriting your iPod library with whatever is in the laptop's library. But this should only affect the music - any files you have copied are unaffected by the iTunes music update. So in theory, your backups should be still there. Like Ross says, do the disk use thingy and have a look - it might not recognise it as a drive until you do that. Are you on a PC or a Mac?

James Henry said...

Ah, now you see, I'm on a Mac. Fool that I am. I suspect my old iBook is slightly wonky though, so I'm madly backing up everything on CDs before I roll my sleeves up and dive into its innards...

When I plug in the iPod, it completely fails to recognize it, even though iBook has the most up to date iPod Updater. Stupid thing....

patroclus said...

I've found a great song called 'Bill Gates Must Die', if that's any help. Maybe whatsisname that sings it could do a Steve Jobs version for Mac users.

Anonymous said...

Did you use the ipod (for this anyway) as an external hard drive (i.e. drag & droping the files onto it) or were you doing silly things through itunes or some such software?
If the first then itunes wouldn't affect the data.
The usage makes it look like it's all still there. Don't s'pose you know how much space the files took up vs music?
Have you tried plugging the ipod in to the mac before you boot it? Or force quitting Finder when it doesn't show up?

Anonymous said...

Dear god, I'm turning into tech help. I may have to go & lock myself in a dark room for a while...

James Henry said...

All tech help gratefully received!

I've tried all the above - looks like the old iBook isn't quite up to scratch, and simply isn't recognizing the iPod for some reason, despite the software being up to date. What I'll do is reinstall the iBook software, but not just yet, as it's my only means of communication with the outside world. So I'm going to assume all the backup files are safe within the iPod, I just can't get to them at the moment....

Anonymous said...

Despite Apple's claims, ipods aren't actually mutually exclusive to PCs/Macs. Why not pop down the local Cybercafe (in Cornwall I'm guessing it's 25 miles away). Get the files & burn them to disc.

James Moran said...

They're not exclusive, but it's been formatted on a Mac, and might behave oddly if connected to a PC - it's basically a hard drive, and Windows likes hard drives to be formatted in the nice, safe formats that it's used to. Don't risk it on a PC if there are files on there you need, wait until you have a working Mac to connect it to.

iPod Shuffles are different, they're formatted as FAT32, which both PCs and Macs can read easily.

Anonymous said...

#Sighs#

I miss Toy-Fu.