I broke my iPod last week. I was installing an update for an app. It prompted to reboot. When I did, it gave me the recovery screen, the one that told me that I should plug it to iTunes. I slept it off since it was late in the day. When I woke up, I plugged it in and got no change in the error. It was then that I knew that I was in trouble. My authenticator was in my iPod. If I didn’t get it to work, I wouldn’t be able to play WoW.
So I hauled my ass off to work, figuring that I’ll try to resolve the problem there. iTunes needed to download the recovery software needed to restore my iPod back to factory settings so that was the first thing that I tried. I then found out that our corporate firewall blocked iTunes from doing so so I had to try something else. How about a manual download of the recovery software, I thought. So I did, downloading the latest version for my iPod Touch. I went back to iTunes, tried to load it and it gave me another error. A little digging revealed that it was caused by a digital signature issue that Apple stopped using. Which meant I was stuck.
It time to think out of the box. What could I do to force my device to load the restore software? I already had it so I figured there must be some other app out there that would do it. I found two other things but they also failed miserably. I was a little tired at that point. If I gave up on the problem, I was looking at the possibility of bringing it to a service center then waiting at least a week before I could get it back. It wasn’t a prospect that I was looking forward to.
I don’t know what led me to it, but I eventually found out that my iPod Touch wasn’t a 3G model. It’s a 3rd gen device, sure, but it was only 2G. I had been using the wrong restore software all along. I then downloaded the correct one, went back to iTunes. This time, there was no digital signature error because Apple was still using it for this version of the software. After a few minutes, my iPod was restored. From the start of the repair process to the end of it, I spent 6 hours fixing it. It took forever, but you’re looking at someone who had zero knowledge when it comes to fixing iPods so I just took it for what it was.
When I got home that day I installed my apps and songs. It was then that I found out that my authenticator was out of sync so I still couldn’t log in. I informed the officers in my guild and filed a ticket with Blizzard to sort things out. I just found it incredibly ironic that the very thing that was securing my account was also preventing me from accessing it.