WARNING! PLEASE READ! iTUNES 2 ALERT

M

mfhaque

Registered
people are reporting that itunes 2 from the apple site is wiping out hard drive paritions. there is an article from macintouch.com that takes you to a discussion on the apple site.

here are some...

I just installed the OS X version of iTunes 2 and it seems to have almost wiped all my non-OS X hard drive partitions clean.

I have a 40 GB Maxtor partitioned into 8 sections and a 20 GB Maxtor drive. The OS X partition seems to be OK but , other than a few token folders and files, all my other partitions have been erased. Norton's Unerase finds nothing to recover.

I hope mine is an isolated case. Thank God for my external Firewire drive I use for backups.

---

Sorry to disappoint you (and especially Apple) but iTunes 2 has done that to my drives too.
My Configuration: 20 GB and 40 GB Disk, partitioned.

Well, I'm very angry and waiting for a public excuse from Apple.
 
I'm sorry to hear that something caused your partitioins to be dumped. I installed it this morning onto one of two partitions on my 2 Gig hard drive, and no dammage was caused to either drive. I lost nothign.

I wonder if it only erases partitions that are up in the high memory address territory?
 
i'm reading what people are posting at the apple discussion, some are like you with no problems..and some are pissed coz they lost a lot. i havn't tried it and i won't until apple figures out whats going on. i'm happy with itunes 1.1 so i'm not in a rush to get itunes 2
 
My harddrive is partitioned as well...but I could care less what iTunes 2 does to it...because there's currently NOTHING on it. :)
 
Please, guys, think about it.

WHY in the world would iTunes 2 erase your hard drive? If anything, it's probably a coincidence, or that the user accidentally set the Installer to erase a partition before installing (if that's even possible).

It's impossible for a package that works in conjunction with the installer to erase a hard drive.. it simply installs software.
 
lol.
Why don't you guys just backup your information onto a network or even your OSX drive and then install iTunes 2 and see how it works out?
 
if like 1 person was reporting it, it could be. But at apple.com/support, its DOZENS of people.
Remember the installer cna run with root privileges, and remember its trying to delete iTunes 1.1
A guy on that Apple.com/support thread has an interesting theory where:
rm Volumes/Disk 2/Applications/iTunes

would be interpreted as 2 commands:

rm Volumes/Disk
and
rm 2/Applications/iTunes

Disk 2 being a partition... if you have one named Disk, your outta luck =/
 
one thing. why are you people partitioning your drives anyways! i have a 20 gig and a 60 gig, both unpartitioned! partitioning is a pain, eliminates HD space, and all around sucks. if you copy something from one partition to the other, ITS JUST COPYING TO ITSELF! just on a different part of the HD. i see no use for partitions EXCEPT!!! for different formats. Like i use to have my 20 partitioned into two. one as a unix sys for OSX (i had heard it would probobly go a little faster on a unix part.) and the other HFS+ for OS9. YOU DONT NEED IT FOR ANYTHING ELSE. if you do, you constantly have to worry about HD space and take the time for copying from one partition to the other. trust me people, this thing has done you a favor, unpartition your drives!

NOTE: i dont check this site almost at all anymore so i wont be reading your rants, bitches, and reply's to my post. :cool:
 
d***
if u have partitions with different sorts of data on it
1) it organises data different sizes for different uses
2) when the os decides to go tits up and delete the volume info headers on its partition and norton can only recover data files with random names and applications asigned to them, the other partitions have a greater chance of surviving thus saving u'r data
yes you should back up your data but when you are a student and have limited funds its hard, especialy when some files are larger than a single cd. also backup drives often end up being filled with dv mp3's etc
3) if u are troubleshooting or thinking of making changes to your os you can do it on a spare partition so if it goes tits up you can always reboot into a known working partition and try again

c***
get a life and stop bitching about people partitioning there drives. i've read u'r response on the apple pages and macintouch pages

i would recommend everyone have a small 1gb or less partition for their os its seperate u know no apps are going to bomb and take it down and its easily backed up

partition partition partition
it will save you much time (i know itunes is messing up but os x is too hard to troubleshoot unless you know unix which is as far away from os 6-9x as ms-dos)
:confused: :confused:
 
Okay. First of all, I have installed iTunes 2 for OS X this afternoon and everything is fine. Maybe I'm just lucky or the above comment is right and you could have problems if your partitions have names with spaces in it. Mine are called Puma, Classic & Apps. Maybe you should rename your partitions before installing.

I say: Make backups. Not because of iTunes 2, because you're going to be angry if you lose your data WHATEVER the cause.
 
It says: Mac OS X version following soon. Guess they read the threads on their boards.
 
work around theory for itunes installation in os x.1
if you have multiple partitions remove them from the desktop (unmount them). i.e in os 9.1 you can drag them to the trash and get a message asking if you want to remove them from the desktop and that they will reappear when you restart (i make an alias of them stick them on my ram drive, then when i want to remount them i double click the alias and they remount)
run the itunes installation (no reports that the running osx.1 partition is erased)
hopefully the installer won't see the other partitions and therefore won't erase them
restart os x.1 hopefully this will remove installer remnants and remount the partitions unmounted earlier.

comments are welcome
 
Yeah, SimX, its not a coincidence... the problem is that Apple decided that pax was better than tar and then to top it off they borked the installer.

pax has a nasty habit of overwriting permissions if the permisions on the machine that the archive was made on doesn't have the exact same permissions as the target machine, this can be nasty but not as nasty as the next part.

There are bugs in the installer (since the PB and I have not heard that they fixed them, please correct me if they have) in which if the pkg isn't made correctly and it needs to delete something it can delete a whole tree. Say that we need to delete "/Applications/iTunes 1.1". If the pkg isn't made correctly, then it will delete iTunes 1.1, then thinking that it needs to delete the parent directory because its empty (even though its not) it will delete /Applications/ and then thinking that its parent directory is empty it will delete / which basicaly wipes everything off your disk.

Now I would think that this problem has something to do with the bug that causes the second problem, and that who ever made the iTunes 2 pkg, made it in such a way that tickled the bug and made it wipe other partitions instead of the partition its installing on to.
For reference to the first bug check out this article. I am still looking for the emails on the problems with the recursive deleteing of directory trees.
 
stompa... cut it out with the inflamatories...

Not a good way to get introduced to a whole bunch of people you don't know.

Make your points, and issue your opinions, no one will complain, but keep the synonymous penis references off the boards.

Thank you...
 
Installed I Tunes2 no problems at all everything works as it should.
Looking forward to my Ipod within the next 2 weeks.


________________________________________________________________
Dano
Dual G4 500Mhz, 708Mb, 36 gig (Scsi) HD OSX 10.1 IPOD (On Order)
Amiga 4000T Video Toaster, LightWave, Video Flyer
 
In another forum, a knowledgeable poster has theorized that the data loss happens if you have two or more drives/partitions with similar names and spaces in their names (such as Disk 1, Disk 2, Disk 3). In such conditions, an installer script that is meant to remove previous versions of iTunes instead removes entire drives!
I myself have two partitions with totally dissimilar names, and one does have a space in it. I installed iTunes 2 with no ill effects. Whew!
:eek:
 
If that's the case, I'm really freakin' glad I manually threw out the old iTunes first, like the instructions said. But do we know that it's a bug of the installer? Things would sort of point that way since the installer has known problems, but I haven't seen it corroborated.
 
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