iTunes or Felix, why ya buggin’?!

I’m scratchin’ my head over here. I am having major issues with either 1) my machine/iTunes or 2) my iPod. I was leaning towards the latter, but now I’m not so sure. Two nights ago, I noticed something peculiar: my iPod, “FELIX”, would mount on my desktop, but was not recognized in iTunes. What’s more, all of my email actually lives on FELIX and Mail was also unable to recognize FELIX was present. That meant I could not check my email (not by using Mail, anyway). I was, however, able to look around inside of FELIX using Finder. After a nice marathon IM with my pal, mistersquid (plus a previous pep-talk on the wonders of keeping daily Mail backups), I was able to restore Mail to its usual self, pulling all the needed info off FELIX just fine.

::wipes sweat off brow::

But what about iTunes? I made a backup of all my music files, made a backup copy of my iTunes preferences file for giggles (com.apple.iTunes.plist), (gulp) deleted iTunes, and downloaded a new copy of iTunes, straight from Apple. The .dmg finished downloading, double-clicking produced the usual, mounted disk image, and inside I found the stock Read-Me file and the iTunes installer (iTunes.mpkg). I double-clicked it and off we went. Not so fast! I got to the fifth step of the install and noticed something interesting: Of the three possible selections for what to install on my HD partition, “ebi”, the main thing that I want, iTunes, was shown to have a size of 0 bytes. WTH?!? That, and the "Action" to be taken for all three options, "Skip". Oh, and when I tried to select any of these options? I was not allowed to actually “check” any of the three possible selections. Weird! “Okay,” I thought, “I am sketched-out by that 0 bytes, and this installer obviously does not want me to get specific with my selections, so let’s click ‘Easy Install’ and see what happens. . .” “. . . okay,” I clicked “Install” and There is nothing to install!!! “But I got this directly from Apple!” I was maybe a little emotional at this point. I then proceeded to eject the disk image, delete the .dmg and redownload the installer from Apple’s website. All of the above happened again. I am so stupefied. I am a little concerned because this iPod has been formatted for a PC, and I’ve been traipsing files back and forth with it between my work PC and my home Mac. I wonder if I will have to reformat it for a Mac and call it a day. For now I’m just going to brood about this and be sad I am without access to both my iPod and iTunes on my Mac. That, and I am throwing this out there for anyone who is a little more savvy about all of this stuff than me. The only real hack I’ve seen for the most similar situation was for Linux and that is a beast beyond my comprehension. UPDATE: So msq was mostly right in thinking that installer had reason to believe iTunes was still on my machine, but not because the application itself was still there. It was actually because iTunes "receipts" were still hanging around. As I mention above (and shown in the first and second screenshots), all of the components in the installer were uncheckable and dimmed (or, not installable). Apple suggests:

1. Quit the iTunes installer.
2. Quit iTunes.
3. Open the /Library/Receipts folder on your hard disk.
4. Drag the following files to the Trash:
   • iTunes.pkg
   • iTunesX.pkg (where X is a version number)
5. Open the iTunes installer again and proceed with the installation.

That worked. I actually had four receipts to delete, but then I was able to reinstall iTunes. FELIX still didn't show up in this new version of iTunes however, and so I gave up. I took all the data off the 'pod and restored it, this time back to it's home on my Mac. I'm sad I won't have the convenience of plugging it in on my work PC, but at least now I can get rid of that CAPS-LOCK nightmare, and name it how I wanted it in the first place, "felix".