Etherplex » Mac

Macbook failure

Rick — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 06:24:35 +0000

My Macbook (13″, purchased May ’07) just ceased to boot (black screen on startup). Tried all the standard tricks, no luck. Took it in to the Apple store and they tested and declared that one of the memory (RAM) slots had failed, but it would boot if I removed the RAM from that slot. They said the flat rate for repair (regardless of problem) is $280. I’m opting to replace the RAM in the remaining slot with a new stick that has twice the capacity (1x1GB vs. 2x512MB) instead, sacrificing half my RAM bandwidth for $250 (the RAM cost $30). New Macbook soon?

OS X Bootable Clones with Free Tools

Rick — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:29:41 +0000

In the last post, I use the excellent SuperDuper! tool to make a
bootable clone of my hard drive. There are some (more advanced)
techniques that can be used that allow bootable clones to be created
on the command line using free tools. I had some trouble getting
clones to work on the command line, but finally worked through the
problems using the technique described below. Most all of this
information is in Bombich Software’s guide.

Use Disk Utility to set the drive to use a GUID partition table

Macs can boot without this being the case, but since the internal disk
uses this kind of a partition table, it’s good to have your clone use
the same setup. I’m pretty sure this isn’t necessary, but it worked for
me as I was trying to solve some issues with the clones working.

Ensure the volume’s “Ignore Ownership on this volume” is *not* checked

By default, external drives will set this option when OS X formats
them. This will ruin the clone, as the system will not boot if files
are set to a UID of 99. So, immediately after formatting your drive,
right click on it and open the “Get Info” option. At the bottom of
that panel, *uncheck* the option that says “Ignore Ownership on this
volume”. This will allow the copy you are going to make to boot.

Clone with a command like asr, ditto, rsync, etc.

I used ditto successfully:

sudo ditto -X / /Volumes/Clone

For incremental backups, rsync can be used as is described on Bombich Software’s guide to backups:

sudo rsync -xrlptgoEv –progress –delete / /Volumes/Clone

When booting, get diagnostic information with Command-V

During the first boot from the clone, you can hold down Command-V as
the system boots to get more information about the boot process. If
something goes wrong, at least you’ll have some error messages you can
use as a basis for a search on the internet.

Added Disk Clone & Upgrade Tutorial Video for Macbook

Rick — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 22:20:49 +0000

The Macbook I bought back in May of 2007 has been getting a bit long in the tooth. Shortly after I bought it, I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB, so the memory and the processor have been holding up just fine for me, as I mainly program and use VMWare (not much gaming). But, after a while, the 70 GB hard drive starts to feel a bit cramped, as the Macbook is my main machine. I’ve mitigated the problem by buying various external drives, but nothing can replace a nicely sized internal disk.

So it was time for a disk upgrade. It turns out that upgrading the disk with command line tools (as was my original intention) like asr, rsync, or ditto copies the files intact, but won’t make the disk bootable unless the root file system is mounted read-only. I can get my Mac into single-user mode, but, coming from Linux, I’m not sure how to remount the root filesystem read-only on the BSD-based OS X. Plus, I can’t use my screen capture utility in single-user mode.

So, I ended up researching other tools, like CCC and SuperDuper! SuperDuper! seemed to fit the bill, so that is what I made the video with, but I’d be very interested to see what people’s experiences have been with CCC and/or command line tools making bootable clones for use in an upgrade. Anyway, the video is now posted on YouTube:

Macbook Hard Disk Clone & Upgrade