I’ve been happily running my iPod Touch with it’s original 1.1.4 firmware (jailbroken of course), but there were some apps that I really wanted from the App Store. I bit my pride, grudgingly loaded iTunes on my laptop, signed up for an iTunes account, and downloaded the 2.1 upgrade.
I discovered that although iTunes can run over USB1.1, upgrading firmware doesn’t work so well. I totally bricked the iPod while trying to upgrade. The laptop happily reported that something was plugged in, but iTunes would have nothing to do with the device, so I could restore it. At that point I went to bed angry and had weird dreams about installing software.
The next morning, I dug up my copy of XP (activated for VMWare) and preceded to load it on a spare computer that actually had USB 2.0. I didn’t hook up the network because I didn’t want to accidentally activate it, I just need it to unbrick my iPod. Then I discovered that iTunes refused to do anything until I hooked it up to the network — ugh. After that iTunes recognized the iPod, restored it to the 2.1 firmware the iPod rebooted into 2.1
Jailbreaking was also an easy process, the only road bump I hit was having to load the latest .NET ont the computer before Quickpwn would run.
Lessons learned:
- Although Apple make cool hardware, it’s proprietary software sucks
- Don’t try to upgrade or restore and iPod over USB 1.1
- iTunes requires an internet connection before it’ll recognize an iPod Touch for the first time.
- QuickPwn requires .NET
Posted by benjamen as XP, computer, electronics, iPhone/iPod Touch at 8:48 PM UTC