Skye's Blog of Doom

For quite a long time I'd been happily using my girlfriend's Mac formatted iPod with iTunes 6 on my Windows PC by using the great and wonderful MacDrive HFS driver. After upgraded to iTunes 7 though, for some reason it stopped working. About a week later the MacDrive 6.1.5 update was released, promising compatibility with iTunes 7 but iTunes still wouldn't recognize the iPod and insisted it needed to be reformatted for Windows.

I decided to try uninstalling and reinstalling MacDrive which pointed to the real problem. Apparently Daemon Tools (which I use to mount ISO images on drive letters, saves having to burn them) uses a "SCSI Passthrough Device" to fake its drive letters and that interferes with MacDrive operation, detailed in this knowledgebase article. I uninstalled Daemon Tools, rebooted, deleted SPTD*.sys from WINDOWS\System32\Drivers, rebooted again, and reinstalled MacDrive.

Success! iTunes 7 now recognizes the Mac formatted iPod again. Apparently more recent versions of Daemon Tools don't use the SPTD driver, but I haven't tried installing a newer version to see if it will coexist better with MacDrive. I'm just glad we both have lots of podcasts to listen to on the long bus ride back from Vancouver next week.

# posted by Skye Poier Nott : 11:02 PM