unixwiz

Today I set out to see if Windows 7 would run MS Flight Simulator X any better than Windows XP did. I found that Windows XP on my Mac Pro (Dual Xeon with 10GB of ram) ran very sluggish. Partly because Windows XP (32-Bit) would only recognize about 3.5 Gig of the 10GB of ram that was installed in the machine. So since I recently got a Technet subscription (I seem to have to do a little more Windows stuff now at work, so thought I might as well learn what I have to manage) I downloaded the Windows Ultimate 7 to see how it would perform before going out and buying it. So I did a Time Machine backup of my data on my Mac Pro and then inserted in the Windows 7 disc and hit the “go”. It took a couple of hours to do the install, patch it, update boot camp stuff and install Flight Simulator. Once it was installed I was impressed that it actually performed much better than it did on Windows XP. I could actually turn the graphics stuff up on it and almost run it at 1900×1200 with out any jerking around. I then did a couple of flights and then it was time to boot back in to MacOS to get some real work done. This is when I about lost it..

See when I booted windows 7 it had found the other 3 data drives that were all HFS+ drives in my Mac. It decided to assign a drive letter to them all. I went in and un did that as I did not want Windows to touch those drives. I thought all was well, until I booted in to MacOS. When I logged in, it told me that the drives could not be read, and it couldn’t find my home directory (which was one of those drives). I was PISSED! So the first thing I did was pop up the disk utility and this is what I saw (minus the 2 1TB seagate drives):

What pissed me off was that every partition I clicked on, it said it was an MS-DOS partition. Surely Windows didn’t screw around and format all my drives.. I was at a loss, all my data was on there, 20,000+ pictures, all the video I was working on, everything… So I decided to see what I could see from the command line. So off to the command line, and I ran the “diskutil list” command and saw this:

Yup, Micro$oft had screwed with my partitions.. So I was hoping that maybe it just changed the partition type and my data was still there. So I poked around to see if there was a way to change the partition type. In the gui tool, the only way to do it is to “format” it over, which meant I would loose everthing, and I didn’t have any backups, as the disk2 in there was my Time Machine backup drive. So thinking to my Solaris side, I knew there was a program called “fstyp” that would tell you what a particular disk slice was formated as. So I gave it a shot and MacOS has that program:

So I ran the fstyp util againest one of the slices, and it came back saying it was HFS… Hot diggity dog.. Maybe my data is still all there.. So I did a mount on it as readonly and it worked. I could see all the data on the drive. So I immediatly started copying data from the drive to an external USB drive (the first 1TB seagate drive in the picture above). But the problem now was, I had 3 x 500GB harddrives of information. The 1TB drive only had about 400GB free. So off to Best Buy and I picked up a Seagate 1TB Firewire drive. Brought it home and mounted up the other partitions and started copying the data. It has been going on for about 2 hours or more now on the copy. I will say that the Seagate Firewire 800 drive is spanking the ass off of the Seagate USB drive.

Once I have backed up all the data.. (Hint use the ditto command) I will see if there is a way to change the partition type with out reformatting the drive. If there isn’t then I will have to reformat and then ditto the data back on to the Internal drives..

Hopefully this will help some one else if they get the same problem, and it (MacOS) tells you “you must initialize the drive”. DONT. Tell it to cancel and then you can save your data.. If you initialize it, you may end up loosing all your data.

—Update

As I waited for the data to finish copying I decided to test some stuff on my time machine drive. I read a bunch on the GUID labels that are on the disks. Using the gpt command i did a listing of the GUID info for the drive. Using that information I deleted the index 2 and added a new one with the Apple HFS GUID label:

In the above, you can see I removed index 2. As soon as I did that, this window popped up:

I just selected ignore on it. Then went on to put in the new GUID label which was the third command in the shot above. The numbers (409640, and 976101344) are taken from the line that has index 2 on it above. You MUST use the exact same numbers, otherwise you are going to change the partition size and may corrupt your data. The value after the -t is the GUID value for MacOS HFS (HFS+), which I found on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUID_Partition_Table, you can also see that the one that was listed before I removed it was a Windows Basic Data Partition.

As soon as I hit enter on the gpt command to add it in, the gui disk utility immediately changed and now showed me my data was there. It also mounted the disk like nothing had happened.

I am going to wait till the copying is done and then do the other two drives and then I should be back to where I was before I installed Windows 7.

More info on the Apple GPT is at : http://developer.apple.com/mac/library/technotes/tn2006/tn2166.html

Apple, Interesting, M$ Winders, MacOSX, Random Stuff, Rant, tips backup, diskutil, GPT, GUID, MacOS X, partition, Windows 7

Just released, another exploit to Internet Explorer 6 & 7, that allows “hackers” to install software on your machine… What do the major Antivirus people say:

“To minimize the chances of being affected by this issue, Internet Explorer users should ensure their antivirus definitions are up to date, disable JavaScript and only visit Web sites they trust until fixes are available from Microsoft,” Symantec said.

How many mom and pop’s out there even know how to disable java script, and only visit sites they trust? Let alone make sure their antivirus definitions are updated. I have seen some virus trick Symantec’s AV in to thinking the definitions were up to date, and then I go to find hundreds of virus’ on my parents computer. This is just another reason why building the web browser in to the OS is a bad thing and why it should be sandbox’d off in to its own little area.

M$ Winders, MacOSX, Random Stuff, Rant, Security IE, Rant, Security, WIndows

After reading this PDF about the Apple Tax, I  find it interesting that they do not include anything about the PC Tax…..

So here is my take on the stuff that is missing:

1. OS Upgrades for a multiple PC house vs a multiple MAC House. Most households probably have more than one PC/Mac in the house now days. So when a new OS comes out, how much does it take to “upgrade” the house.. Looking at the current price of Microsoft Vista Home Premimum, it is $115.99 for the Upgrade edition. MacOSX Leopard is currently $129.00. So for one computer, yes MacOS is a little more expensive, but lets look at if you have 4 computers in the house. To upgrade your 4 PC’s to Vista, you are going to pay $463.96. If you have 4 Mac’s, to upgrade them to MacOS X Leopard, $199.00.. Yes that is correct it costs you $264.96 more to upgrade 4 PC’s than it does to upgrade 4 Mac’s. This is because Apple offers a “family pack” pricing, which allows you to install the software on up to 5 Mac’s in the same household. Microsoft does not do this.

2. Office Software. If all you need is basic Word processing and spread sheet’s, iWork from Apple does everything you would need. Once again a single upgrade would cost $79, and they offer a family pack too, for $99 you can upgrade 5 Mac’s. Now look at Microsoft Office Home and Student it is $94.45 per computer. So for 4 PC’s, we are up to $377.80 now vs the $99 for iWork on the Mac. Difference of $278.80.

3. Virus protection. For the most part (read as 99%) Mac’s are free of Virus’. So there is no “software” needed on them. But on PC’s you better not even connect it to the Interwebs with out having a virus protection software on the machine. So If we look at the sort of “defacto” Norton Antivirus, it costs $39.99 a YEAR per PC. So for our 4 PC’s it would be $159.96 a YEAR, whereas our Mac is $0.

If we add all this up as if Vista and Office just came out, our cost for upgrading a house of 4 PC’s would be $1,001.72.. Versus if we were to upgrade a house of 4 Mac’s to the newest MacOSX and iWork, it would cost $298.00. For a difference of $703.72. So a having a house of Mac’s is about 70% cheaper to upgrade than a house of PC’s is.

One section of the article is just plain wrong:

Finally, there is a category of costs that could be called opportunity costs, options that are simply not
available in the Apple world.  These options include cutting edge technologies that buyers really want
including HDMI (for connecting a PC to a TV for viewing high-definition content), the aforementioned
Blu-Ray, eSATA (for fast access to external storage), media card readers (for interoperation with other
digital devices like cameras), built-in 3G wireless (to stay connected anywhere cell service is live),
fingerprint readers (to easily access secure data), and TV Tuners (to watch and record broadcast
content).  These technologies, revolutionary now, will one day be standard on all systems.  Too bad if
a Mac buyer has any interest in them.

Has the person never heard of USB media card readers? They are UNIVERSAL… I have a couple of them, work great with the Mac. I also have an Elgato USB TV Tuner that does HDTV, clear QAM and allows my Mac to record shows. There is no reason  you couldn’t put a Blu-Ray reader in a Mac Pro, or even get a USB enclosure for it. Just because some PC’s come with all this stuff built in, unless you are going to user it, does it really matter if it is there. Heck I have a new printer that has one of the Media Card readers in it, so when it is connected via USB to the Mac it looks like any other removable media device.

The final part of the article that sort of is ridiculous, is the author assumes that to do wireless on a Mac you need an Airport Extreme. Sorry to burst your bubble, but there is a reason it is called 802.11[abng] it is a standard that EVERYONE uses. You don’t need to have a specific brand unless you really want to be brand loyal or don’t know any better. I have a $40 Linksys wireless router that works 100% fine with the Mac’s I use. He also talks about the $100 cost for the family pack of the iLife software. I have 3 versions of this, and it is worth the money. Microsoft has NO comparable software offering for that price with the functionality that iLife provides. Even if they did, they would not be selling 5 licenses for $100. It would probably be $50 to $80 per license.

The other issue that he brings up is that most software that works on Windows XP will work on Vista, but people who switch from PC to Mac will have to buy all new software. This is not entirly true. You can use Windows XP/Vista on Mac Hardware either via BootCamp or VMWare Fusion/Parallels Desktop. I do this for a couple of applications that I need that are only available on Windows. But for the most part I have found that everything I need for my day to day computing on the Mac is free software. There are only a couple of programs I have bought because I needed functionality that the provided.. But for the most part there are equivalent Mac programs for every Windows one, and most of the time they are better and some times Free.

I think the next time before some one tries to say how much more Mac’s cost they need to really do their home work. Yes the hardware costs more up front, but in the long run, it last longer, runs better and has less problems. I used to have a Dual G4 for a desktop. It used dual 533Mhz processors and ran MacOSX Tiger just fine. Try running Vista on a Pentium III and we will talk.. Windows is getting better about the bloat, but they still have a LONG way to go.

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I was trying to create a mirror disk in MS Windows XP.. It seems that Micro$oft does not want you to be able to do software mirrors in Windows XP. How freaking stupid is that? They let you create a stripe but not a mirror:

They even have a page about using mirrored volumes in Windows XP, but there is a note in there

Mirrored volumes are not available on computers running Windows 2000 Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, or Windows XP 64-Bit Edition.

that totally sucks. It basically means you have to get a hardware raid device to do mirroring or upgrade to a Windows Server version. Leave it to Micro$oft to leave out a ability that pretty much all other desktop OS’ have built in to them. Not to mention they don’t have SSH either, but that is for another time.

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If this article does not explain it, then nothing should… PC World New Zealand is running an article on how Microsoft is having to create a new build of XP (called XP SP2c) just because there is still such a great demand for it, that they are running out of registration keys… This tells you two things:

1. Vista is not catching on like they had hoped it would.. (Duh!)
2. They originally built in a limitation in to XP on how many actual keys could be sold/generate.

I find it funny that if Vista was supposed to be such a killer OS, that more people have not flocked to it.. But after running it in a previous life for a couple of months I can see why no one is flocking to it.. XP will be the last Windows I use for a LONG time.

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