Wow! That's all I have to say about the new AlBooks. But aside from
the wonderful design these little things are a real pain when it comes
to fixing something that goes wrong. That's where my trusty old Pismo
comes in.
In less than 12 hours after she first got it, I managed to render my
girlfriend's brand new AlBook into a sleek, aluminum Mactop-shaped
paperweight. Everything's fine now though. It started when my
girlfriend saw the cute little Hexley boot image I had on the Pismo. I
then pointed her to the Resexcellence site to check out the tons of
boot images to choose from. She chose one and installed it using
MacBoot. She said something about it complaining about the file size
but clicked on the button to install it anyway. I told her not to worry
too much about it because if anything went wrong we'd just boot the
Restore disk and all would be well.... not!!!
Well all we got after rebooting was an OpenFirmware prompt. Ok. So
something went wrong. I grab her system restore disk and held the 'c'
key when it started just like the instructions printed on the DVD said.
Well....nothing. Thank's Apple! So what to do? Method 1, the brute
force, give OF a couple of boot commands pointing to the CD device
failed miserably. So I had to resort to Method 2, get a firewire cable.
Luckily for me the ONLY places near me that sell 6-pin to 6-pin
firewire cables are a hop, skip and 40 miles away in the most crowded
mall of New York. So finally after an hour (both ways) of driving and a
half-hour of searching for a parking space, then since she came with,
add on another 3 hours for browsing, shopping and a trip to the food
court; I was finally ready to fix our "little" problem.
Firewire cable in hand it was a 2 min fix, connecting the 'books,
starting in target disk mode, replacing the BootX file from backup, and
rebooting. Boy I'm SO happy with Apple's decision to fix (cripple) the
boot process of the new hardware making it really EEEASY to fix
corrupted software by first booting the affected machine ALL the way
(successfully), logging in, then clicking on the cute little Software
Restore app in the Utilities folder. Then after you enter your lovely
admin password, you can finally get some use out of the restore DVD
that clearly reads on disk itself:
"To start up from Mac OS X on this DVD, hold down the C key as the
computer starts up."
Thank goodness I had the Pismo (which by the way, starts up from just
about every Mac system disk I throw at it) but what about those
unfortunate souls that dont have another Mac handy. Well... hopefully
this will at least be a word of warning to them.
Regards,
Seth M.
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
"My girlfriend always laughs during sex --- no matter what she's
reading."
-- Steve Jobs (Founder, Apple Computers)
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