Finally bit The Apple

Well, we have finally bit 'The Apple'. Yes, it is THE Apple, because it does not stand for the source of Adam and Eve's (and consequently all human beings') miseries. Rather, here it refers to our family's finally hopping onto the Steve Job Apple Corp bandwagon. Bacchi, it seems had decided to gift me a portable MP3 player on my b'day and on our recent visit to the mall, we all of a sudden decided to go for an iPOD. After considering all the factors - form factor, cost, storage capacity etc., we settled down for an iPOD Nano Gen 2 player with a storage capacity of 2 GB (differs from the I generation Nanos as per the features listed at - http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2006/sep/12nano.html).
I must admit, though, that the iPOD Nano met with some tough competition from its hard drive based 30 GB cousin - iPOD Video. However, cost considerations, battery life and the very improbability of ever actually using the iPOD to watch videos, won the day for Nano.

Now, let me talk about what went wrong in our first attempt to get our new toy to work...

1. Since, we had used the player with a Macintosh at the shop we had purchased it from, the player got formatted with the Macintosh's HFS Plus file system. So, no matter how hard we tried, the player would not get detected by our home PC. Fortunately, there is an article at apple.com which actually talks about how to get the player to again work with Window.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61672

An excerpt from the article -

You cannot use an iPod whose disk is configured for Macintosh on a Windows-compatible computer. However, you can restore the iPod disk to use it with a Windows-compatible computer. To do this, see "Restoring iPod to factory settings." While a Windows formatted iPod may work on a Mac, Apple supports this configuration only with iPod shuffle.

2. In our eager attempts to get the iPOD functional as soon as possible, we bypassed downloading the latest version of iTUNE software, iTUNE version 7.0. A BIG mistake! as it later turned out to be... The old iTUNE software that I had loaded from a CHIP DVD, failed to recognize the player. Also, running quite true to the adage - "A little knowledge can be dangerous", I ended up corrupting the entire software present on the player. Finally, this apple article helped me restore the player to its factory condition -

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=60983

It is important to understand the difference between "update" and "restore". Update simply installs the software that controls iPod and does not affect the songs and files stored on iPod's disk. Restore erases the iPod's disk and restores iPod to its original factory condition.

3. New iPOD users may also note that Apple claims that a 5 Rs troubleshooting methodology will fix most of the issues with the iPOD players. You can read about these 5 Rs

Reset, Retry, Restart, Reinstall, Restore.

at - http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/five_rs/

4. Well once we had the iPOD detected by our PC, it was time to actually start transferring music to it. The tutorials available at this link were a great assistance in helping us harness the full potential of our iPOD -

http://www.apple.com/support/ipod/tutorial/index.html

5. Also, if you like me, are interested in using your iPOD as a USB storage device as well, do make sure that you go through the article at this link -

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131

Select "Enable disk use" or "Manually manage songs and playlists". Either one will allow you to use iPod as a drive. If you select "Manually manage songs and playlists", iTunes won't automatically update iPod with the iTunes library. If you want iTunes to automatically update your iPod, select "Enable disk use" instead.

6. And finally something I stumbled across in course of my research. According to the apple article at this link -

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61131

you cannot access the songs transferred to the iPOD using the iTUNES software (a means to control illegal music sharing, I suppose).

When you use your iPod as a hard disk, you can't see the media iTunes copies to your iPod in the Finder or My Computer. This is normal. Using the Finder or My Computer, you can't copy these media files from your iPod back to iTunes or to any other computer. The synchronization between your iPod and your computer is one way: from iTunes to iPod.

However, the steps given in the article at this link, easily enabled us to accomplish this seemingly 'impossible' task -

http://www.cnet.com/4520-7899_1-6477981-1.html

I must admit that once we had the initial migration blues sorted out, we really started to enjoy our latest acquisition. I think, one thing that makes the iPOD such a cool gadget is the very design of the device - the soft aluminium body, subtle shades, sharp fonts and a high resolution (although small) screen. No wonder, we are hooked for good.

Safely Remove Hardware

I have lately been reading about "Safely Remove Hardware" option in Windows. Here are some details I have found about this feature -

(1) Was first introduced in Windows ME. Has since been a part of Windows 2000 and Windows XP. Windows 98, unfortunately, lacked this feature.

(2) As Garycase has clarified on Experts Exchange -

There are two issues associated with removing a USB device: (1) possible data corruption; and (2) possible electrical damage. For (1) the problem is that Windows does deferred writes to removeable devices, and if you remove one before it has completed the write process (which can be several seconds after it's "apparently" done) you will have a corrupted drive. As noted above, if you change the settings for the device to optimize it for quick removal, you can disable the write caching feature and then you don't have to worry about this ==> but it will make writes MUCH slower, particularly when copying many small files, as it will close the directory after each file. For (2) there's no workaround -- you're simply taking a risk every time you pull the device out; and any electrical "glitch" can damage either the device itself or your PC's USB port. There are MANY examples in questions here on EE where folks have destroyed USB flash drives; their USB ports; an MP3 player; etc. by not following the "Safely Remove" protocol.

Bottom line: Think of "Safely Remove" as a seat belt. You'll "get by" without using it MOST of the time; but at some point you'll have an accident (i.e. you'll damage your device) and then you'll wish you had used it. If you aren't patient enough to do so, just keep "yanking away" ==> but don't be surprised when your device fails.

Additional note: If a device is self-powered (i.e. uses no power from the USB bus), and is ONLY used for reading data from the device (no writes), then it is much safer to simply "pull" the device. Common devices in this category are digital cameras, or compact flash cards used in powered external readers (e.g. a card reader slot on an all-in-one printer). In those cases, it's "okay" to just pull the device ==> since there's no power issue with the bus and no deferred writes (since nothing's been written to the device).

(3) The "data corruption" issues asssociated with not using "Safely Remove Hardware" option are also discussed in detail over here -

Changes in Windows XP Beta 2

Refinements to Caching Policy for Consumer Storage
Essentially, anything a user can physically remove from a machine could be removed from a running system without prior warning to the operating system - for example, any kind of device on CardBus, PC Card, USB, IEEE 1394, and so on. However, the area of greatest concern is storage devices, because of the possibility of data loss or corruption when surprise removal of these devices occurs.

To mitigate the likelihood of data loss in these scenarios, Windows XP has a refined caching policy for removable storage. As of Windows XP Beta 2, for consumer-oriented removable storage (USB, Flash, Zip, and so on), write caching is disabled by default.

Disabling write caching means that, instead of saving up changes for a file on a removable storage device and then doing a bulk write, Windows XP writes changes to the file as the changes are made. This keeps data on removable storage devices more current, mitigating the likelihood of data loss. However, disabling write caching also has a performance impact. Therefore, for IEEE 1394 hard disk drives, Windows applies a special case for the default caching policy by not disabling write caching for these devices.

The basic way to think of write caching policy is:
- If write caching is disabled by default, the storage device in question is optimized for safe surprise removal. This is the appropriate action for slower, consumer-oriented storage devices such as flash-type memory.
- If write caching is enabled by default, the storage device in question is optimized for performance. This is the appropriate action for high-performance storage such as SCSI and IEEE 1394 hard disk drives.

Note that caching policy defaults for a given device can be changed in Device Manager.

Optimizing the Default Caching Policy
As noted earlier, in Windows XP Beta 2, IEEE 1394 hard disk drives have write caching enabled by default, to optimize for performance rather than for safe surprise removal. This also means users should first stop IEEE 1394 hard disk drives using the hotplug applet before removing them. However, the Beta 2 mechanism for special-casing IEEE 1394 hard disk drives requires additional refinement.

This content has been culled from the Microsoft site - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/pnppwr/hotadd/XPrem-devs.mspx

(4) Is applicable for all hot swappable devices like - IEEE 1394 devices and USB devices.

(5) In case, you got a hot swappable mass storage device plugged in and you do NOT get the "Safely Remove Hardware" option to STOP the device before unplugging it, you can use the following instructions to manually invoke the "Safely Remove Hardware" option -

You can click on Start, Run..., and type in:
RunDll32.exe shell32.dll,Control_RunDLL hotplug.dll
And press OK.
That will bring up the "Safely Remove Hardware" dialog.
A side effect could be that the "Safely Remove Hardware" icon reappears as it should.
If it happens often enough, you can create a desktop shortcut for this geeky looking command.

These instructions have been pulled from the site -
http://ask-leo.com/safely_remove_hardware_where_did_the_icon_go_how_do_i_safely_remove_hardware_without_it.html

(6) Bottom line -
If it is a hot swappable mass storage device, you MUST stop the device before you unplug it. In this case, you might go to the extent of manually invoking the "Safely Remove Hardware" wizard.
If it is just any other hot swappable device and is self powered, go ahead, unplug it without any need to STOP the device.
If it is a hot swappable device, NOT self powered and NOT a mass storage device, see if you can locate the "Safely Remove Hardware" wizard. If you can, stop the device before you unplug it. If you cannot, well go ahead and yank it out anyway.