Joho the Blog » os_x

New Mac, and cloning BootCamp XP

davidw — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 23:37:41 +0000

Because one of our children needs a new computer, I’ve ordered a brand new 15″ MacBook Pro … for myself. Our child will get my current MacBook 13″. Don’t look at me like that! I’m more of a power user than our child is. And I’m older. Also, I’m paying for it. But mainly it’s a totally rational decision that happens to work out in my favor.

I know that setting up the new Mac will be simple. I’ll plug my old one into the new one (I’m getting a firewire cable that’s 400 on one and 800 on the other, and if that doesn’t work, I’ll connect through the ethernet ports) and the new Mac will suck the life force (= my user directories ‘n’ stuff) out of the old one.

What will really take some time is rebuilding my Bootcamp Windows XP partition: Reinstall XP, and reinstall the few apps I use. (I am still using Microsoft Money, waiting for the new version of Quicken for the Mac, which keeps getting postponed.) I’d much rather clone the old Bootcamp partition onto the new machine. So, I looked around and found Bart PE and YouTube instructions for burning a Bart PE boot disk. I believe I now have to make a disk image of my current Windows partition, save it onto a USB hard drive, and then, well, I don’t exactly know, but I’ll figure it out. Maybe.

[Tags: macbook mac windows os_x clone bootcamp ]

Mac issue: Where’d my network go?

davidw — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:29:51 +0000

My new new Mac (a white one) is well, except Finder doesn’t see my family network. To be more exact, there’s no “Network” icon listed in the sidebar of Finder. If I go to Finder’s prefs and toggle “connected servers” or “bonjour computers” on and off, there’s no change. But, if I go to Connect to Server and tell it to connect to smb://192.168.0.134, which happens to be the static IP of a network storage device, it finds it fine, and shows it to me in the Finder. It likewise finds smb://honkervista, which is my big, Vista-crippled machine.

I’ve tried making random alterations in the system config network panel, since that traditionally has forced empty network panes to fill up properly. Not in this case.

Should I really have to be mounting these machines by hand?? TIA…

[Tags: mac os_x network_configuration ]

Crowd-sourced debugging

davidw — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 21:50:42 +0000

If anyone would like to help me figure out why my MacBook crashes seemingly randomly, here are some crash reports: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9.

My MacBook is 9 months old. Apps were crashing under Panther. I did a total clean reinstall of Leopard. It seemed to be ok for a couple of weeks, and then the apps began crashing again. I took it in to a highly recommended local Apple shop. They kept it for a week, ran thorough diagnostics, replicated some of the crashes, and replaced the motherboard. Again, for a couple of weeks it seemed to work. Now things crash intermittently but fairly frequently. Usually, the crashes only crash the app, but Keynote has crashed all the way back to a cold boot a couple of times; I don’t have crash reports for the cold boots.

Help? Any ideas?[Tags: mac os_x tech ]

Beginnger-to-Beginner: Enabling php in Leopard

davidw — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 18:55:31 +0000

You want to see some nice tech writing? James Pelow at PHPmac explains how to enable the Leopard apache server to use php. It’s written so clearly, even I could follow the instructions! (Because he wrote this in 2005, you’ll want to change the references to php4 to php5.)

[Tags: php leopard os_x tech_help good_writing ]