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iCal Oddity

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A week back, I tried to convert my local account to a Portable Home Directory that synced to the server. The experiment was partially successful, but partially not. So, I reverted back. This process basically meant that I had to delete my local account, and create a new one. This is the key piece to my problem that I’ll get to in a bit.

So basically, once I’d reverted, most things worked. I had some oddities with keychains that I fixed by randomly trying things until it worked. The weirder issue was with iCal.

In iCal, I could add events, and move events, but I couldn’t delete ANYTHING. I’d delete an account from iCal (like my google calendar account), it would go away for about 10 seconds, then come back. If I tried to move an event, it would show up in the new place, but the place where it used to be would still be there (so basically, it would duplicate). I’d delete the duplicate, it would go away for a few moments, then come back. I couldn’t figure it out.

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Bootcamp Assistant Nightmare

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So, I recently got accepted into a beta program for a popular game. The problem is, there’s no Mac version of the beta yet. So, I had to get a windows machine up and going. All the PCs in my home, and at work, aren’t really capable of playing modern games. So, I had to get bootcamp working on my laptop (which is still fairly old, but at least is a C2D Macbook Pro (2006)).

So, I started with just trying to run bootcamp assistant. It failed saying “cannot move files”. Great. So, looking online, I found that it can be caused by insufficient space on the HD. So, I removed some data from my laptop. Ran the assistant again, and got the same result. Moving on, I tried using the work copy of iDefrag. I did both the “compact” option, and the “full optimize” option. After both, the result of the bootcamp assistant was the same: “unable to move files”.

So finally, after spending probably 16 hours on this problem, I “Target Disk Mode” booted my MBP, and hooked it up to my Mini Server, and ran Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my MBP to a disk image. Then, repartitioned the drive on the MBP as 1 partition, HFS+ Journaled. Then, ran CCC and restored the disk image back to the MBP HD. (Total time for backup, then restore, about 2 hours for 50GB (about 1 hour for each direction). I then booted the MBP back up, and ran the Bootcamp assistant. It worked!

So, while iDefrag SHOULD have been enough to move everything up to the start of the disk, it didn’t seem to be enough. CCC does file level copies, so wiping the drive, then restoring it, basically moved everything to the start of the drive, and all non-fragmented. Who knows, maybe the bootcamp assistant just looks at the age of the partition and decides to fail based upon it’s age. *shrugs*

Anyway, I installed XP SP3 since I couldn’t get Win 7 64-bit to install. I’m going to give it another shot when I have some time, given this link that seems to address the issue I saw when I tried booting from the Win 7 DVD.

So, all told, 18-20 hours (with some sleep in there) to install XP to play one game that’ll probably have a Mac version of the beta out in a couple weeks. But, it was worth it after playing 3 hours tonight, and probably playing more tomorrow.

All that said, Apple really should allow running the Bootcamp assistant from another machine while the “target” is in TDM. Or, run it from single user mode. The former should allow everything to be moved, and the latter should allow moving of just about everything but the kernel. *shrugs* Bit annoying. But, it’s really a “corner case” for those of us that want/need to install windows after the initial computer setup. The CCC route seems like the most easy, fast, and logical option. If only I’d thought of it to begin with.

Apple TV Recovery

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UPDATE: Did have a weird issue where the AppleTV was rebooting randomly. Restoring to factory defaults again (after the 3.0.1 update), then re-updating to 3.0.1 seems to have fixed it. Will know more after the weekend.

My boss, about a year ago or more, had his HD crap out on his Apple TV. So, being ingenious, he brought it to me and I proceeded to get it back working by finding a DMG online of the boot partition that allowed it to work again. Problem was, he couldn’t run software updates on it. It would see the update, but wouldn’t let him install it. Was quite odd.

So, fast forward to today, when he finally brought it back in, and I started looking around online. Turns out, you need the recovery partition to be intact for updates to work. Not sure why, but you do.

So, after looking all around online, I did find a source for a full image of a working 2.0.2 Apple TV. If you’re familiar with torrents (and more specifically, the former major torrent site that is still around, but who knows for how long…), you can look for something called “smallatv.rar”.

So, once you have that, take a new drive (or one you’ve removed all the partitions from (you can do this via disk utility by selecting 1 partition, and then for type, select “free space”.), and do the following from terminal.

diskutil list

With that, find the drive you’re restoring. In my case, it was “disk6”.

Then:

dd if=/location/of/smallatv.dmg of=/dev/disk6 bs=1024k

That’ll take a bit, but you should now have an AppleTV drive. Problem is, the media partition is only 35GB. If you only had a 60GB drive, then you’re good. If you had bigger than that, then read on.

Now, go get a copy of AtvCloner from here: http://dynaflashtech.net/atvcloner/

Load that up, and in the first tab, point it at /dev/disk6 and hit “image source partitions”. This will take a bit, but you should end up with 3 dmg’s. An efi.dmg, a boot.dmg, and a recovery.dmg. Once you have those, quit AtvCloner, and go back into diskutil and “re-empty” the drive.

Okay, so now, go back into AtvCloner, and go to the second tab. In this tab, point it at the 3 dmg’s you just created, and if the drive is bigger than 500GB, then check the appropriate box. Then hit “Prepare New Drive”. This will take a bit, but once you’re done, you will have a functional, and full sized AppleTV drive. Drop that into your AppleTV, and boot it up.

One thing I did notice was that the downloaded image isn’t stock. It has some hack in it, since you see a Linux logo when booting. But, once you’re booted, you can go to “Update Software”, and it’ll download the latest AppleTV OS (in my case, 3.0.1), and update itself, which removes whatever hack was there.

Good luck! I really wish Apple made some stuff easier.