by , 8:00 AM EST, November 5th, 2001
When Apple released iTunes 2 for Mac OS X on Friday, many Mac users found an unexpected and rather unpleasant problem. Some users with multiple partitions found that their Classic partition was wiped clean except for a few seemingly random folders. One of our forum members also reported losing data on his Mac OS X partition:
On the X partition I lost all desktop pictures, Exploder plug-ins such as QuickTime and flash, and all of my iTunes play lists. My MP3's all remained as they are on a different drive - though some of them lost parts of their ID3 tags - which is what I find to be the strangest part.
In addition to the discussion in our forums, you can also find a discussion on this at Apple's discussion boards.
Apple responded quickly and pulled the iTunes 2.0 for Mac OS X installer on Saturday morning. By Saturday afternoon, the company had released an alert and the iTunes 2.0.1 for Mac OS X installer. From Apple's iTunes 2.0 For Mac OS X alert page:
Apple has identified an installer issue with iTunes 2.0 for Mac OS X that affects a limited number of systems running Mac OS X with multiple volumes (drives or partitions) mounted. For those systems, running the iTunes 2.0 installer can result in loss of user data.
While this error is highly unlikely to affect most users, Apple strongly advises that anyone who has downloaded the 2.0 version of iTunes for Mac OS X, as well as anyone who has a beta version of iTunes 2.0 for Mac OS X, immediately remove the iTunes.pkg installer file from their system.
A new version that corrects this issue, iTunes 2.0.1 for Mac OS X, is now available for downloading at www.apple.com/itunes/download/ or by clicking the Download iTunes button below. Users who have already installed iTunes 2.0 without incident do not need to reinstall iTunes 2.0.1, but they should still immediately remove the 2.0 installer file from their system. This issue does not affect users of iTunes 2.0 for Mac OS 9.
The version with the installer error was available from Apple from Friday evening 11/2, to Saturday morning 11/3 (PST) only.
So far, there have not been any problems reported with the 2.0.1 installer. If you aren't sure which version of the iTunes 2 installer for Mac OS X, The Mac Observer recommends trashing it and downloading the latest update from Apple's Web site.