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Some Macintosh users who rushed to download the latest version of iTunes -- Apple's popular digital-music player --were singing a song of woe on Friday. A bug in the installation procedure caused the application to completely delete their computers' hard drives.
Apple issued an alert and a fixed version of iTunes 2 on Saturday morning, and the company urged people to remain calm.
But on Mac discussion boards, few people were calm.
"Feel like throwing this piece of #### through their office window," wrote James Glasgow on Apple's discussion boards. "This is the last straw."
In the alert, Apple said the error is "highly unlikely to affect most users."
The company added that "users who have experienced data loss during iTunes 2 for Mac OS X installation have reported successful restoration of files using file recovery applications."
Apple recommended Symantec's Norton Utilities or MicroMat's TechTool Pro.
However, on Apple's discussion site, hundreds of people reported losing data, many of them describing themselves as "angry," "frustrated" and not "happy campers."
Many also reported that the disk recovery applications didn't work for them and wondered whether Apple could be held liable for the loss of their data.
The bug seems to have affected computers with a very specific configuration: people running Mac OS X who had "partitioned" big hard drives into several smaller ones, and who'd typed a space at the beginning of the drive name.
For example, if a Mac had a drive named " music" instead of "music," it might have been deleted by iTunes.
Tom Fisher, a computer repair technician who lost about 100 gigabytes of information during the installation, said that people often include a space in the drive name to ensure it shows up at the top of the list when they examine their drives.
So far, Fisher said he has only managed to recover about 30 MBs of the data he lost -- about 0.03 percent.
"So I'm very unhappy," he said, unhappily. "I'm not sure what I'm going to do at this point. I'm still waiting for some official statement from Apple about this."
According to Mac experts who examined the code of the buggy iTunes installer, the problem arose from a very tiny programming mistake -- a forgotten quote mark.
Instead of typing the line "$2Applications/iTunes.app", a bleary-eyed coder had instead typed the disastrous $2Applications/iTunes.app, according to a message on MacSlash.
"So easy, and yet even the best of us forget to do it at times," an anonymous user commented.
Some wondered whether Apple would compensate people for their data loss, but many people noted that the iTunes license -- like most software licenses -- indemnified the company against such bugs. Apple could not be reached for comment on Monday to say whether or not it would compensate users.
But one anonymous user said that Apple was compelled to do something.
"They'll try to wriggle out, quoting the license, but what the heck are you going to back up a 40, 60, or 80 gigabyte drive onto -- CD's?" wrote another anonymous poster.
Apple's New Toy: Portable Music
