I installed a replacement 2.5″ SATA drive in my MacBook yesterday, and connected the old disk via USB to run Apple Migration Assistant and transfer all my stuff over. All went well and in 3 hours I was back up and running.

One big weirdie was with Parallels 3 (this was build 5600) which suddenly couldn’t find any network interfaces and wouldn’t let me put it in Shared Networking Mode. This seems to be because the startup service isn’t “there” any more (AMA didn’t transfer it for some reason), and a reinstall of Parallels over the top didn’t work.

Solution was to deinstall Parallels (use the “Uninstall” script which comes with the download) and then install it again. Worked fine, although it re-IP’d my virtual network interface.

Still, very impressed with the Migration Assistant – it even did the apps I’d forgotten about leaving me with a fully working system in a short space of time.

Edit: Something else that doesn’t transfer properly is the 3G software for the Vodafone 3G dongle. Re-run it and it’ll reinstall the modem and network devices, and set itself up properly.

As documented recently, my Macbook Pro had a bit of an accident with a glass of beer the other week and I’m awaiting a replacement keyboard. The MacBook itself is out of warranty and I can do the switch myself for roughly £50. However, at the same time I thought I’d upgrade the internal drive, so I bought a larger SATA drive to fit.

I had some spare time last weekend so wanted to do the reinstall while life is a little quieter. However, the keyboard hadn’t arrived and I didn’t want to have to pull the MBP apart twice. I thus hit upon the idea of using the SATA drive with an external interface (this one from Maplin).

I connected it up to the MacBook (running 10.5.4) and it detected fine. Partitioned it for system installation and commenced a Leopard install from DVD media. So far so good. Once completed, I installed iWork ’08 and Logic Pro (the latter taking 6 hours to install – it does come on 7 DVDs!). Then came Apple System Update which attempted to install lots of things including the combo 10.5.4 update. Bear in mind the drive is running on USB still.

Reboot time. It sits, spinning its cog and showing the grey apple for, ooh, 3 hours. No response from the disk. Must have done something wrong, so I disconnect and reboot back to the internal disk. I download the 10.5.4 combo update and install manually to the SATA drive (still on USB, still recognising from my MacBook Pro running 10.5.4).

Reboot. Sits spinning again.

I start it into verbose mode (command-V on boot), which shows me that it ‘forgets’ the USB interface a little way into the boot sequence. Bugger. So it seems I have found a bug in 10.5.4 which happens only when booting from an external USB drive (if I plug it in when it’s booted from the internal disk it’s fine, and I can do what I want to the disk!).

There’s images documenting it here. If anyone with a little more Apple boot-fu than I have can offer advice that would be good. I’ve attempted without any other USB devices present and still get the same effect. I’ve not tried the disk internally yet, although it does check out fine under Disk Utility.

Nicky’s 15″ MacBook Pro has been exhibiting some signs of weirdness recently – coloured spinner just sticking on, fans going at full rev. A quick look at Apple Hardware Test (comes on the bundled install DVD) said quite helpfully “error 4SNS/1/40000000:TGOD”. A brief Google search suggested that it’s the logic board that’s gone, so it becomes a warranty repair.

Colin recommended an Apple-accredited repair centre in Armley (Leeds) called Clockwork Creative – a quick phone call and they suggested I bring the machine up. Half an hour later and they’ve got the Mac, suggest it’ll be a few days, and they’ll give me a call depending on parts – it’s a nice small place, seem clued-up and very hands-on.

Now we see how good, and given past support nightmares with other larger companies don’t expect me to remain silent on it 😛

Mm, I took advantage of an offer at 7dayshop.com the other week and upgraded my Mac’s RAM to the maximum it’ll take – 3GB! Nicky got the same and it only cost us £34 (including the postage!) for a 2G 667 RAM clip each.

Makes a hell of a difference (even just upgrading from 2GB to 3GB) – $contract right now involves me throwing around huge amount of data (tables of 30 million rows or more) and merging them – the coloured spinner is coming up less, although now it sounds like a 747 taking off when the fans start up. Mmmm, toasty.

With the prices being that low, you’d be daft to not take advantage of it – especially since Leopard is so memory-hungry.

With the installation of Logic Pro 8, Apple’s ‘Spotlight’ feature is required: without it weird things happen such as files not being found when loading sounds! You end up having to manually go digging for files (which, when they’re 6 levels down is a pain in the arse).

So, I’d not actually realised Spotlight wasn’t working on my install of 10.5.2 – it’s not something I use that much but suddenly it became crucial. I dug around a bit and found that it was crashing like thus:

Apr 12 18:51:28 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Formulating crash report for process Spotlight[147]
Apr 12 18:51:29 trixie com.apple.launchd[139] (com.apple.Spotlight[147]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
Apr 12 18:51:34 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Saved crashreport to /Users/joel/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Spotlight_2008-04-12-185121_trixie.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20

Bus error – sounds like a memory issue. Sadly not, it was a little more complex than that!

Next step was to find out how to reindex Spotlight. I found quite a few references on Apple’s support website here which referred to mdutil, but sadly this did odd things too giving me a ‘No index found for volume (-107)’.

Right, the gloves are off. Let’s drop the whole damn spotlight system by:

• Running ‘Fix Permissions’ on the root disk – you never know, something odd might be prodding it.
• Dropping the Spotlight preferences (they might be corrupt) by deleting /Users/joel/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist.
• Killing anything cached by deleting /.Spotlight-V100. This actually gave an error but some stuff disappeared. That’ll do anyway.

At that point I thought ‘hang on – maybe something else is upsetting it?’. Just to be sure, I prevented Spotlight indexing anything to do with Parallels – and therein was the root cause. The damn thing was indexing the virtual disk for Parallels, which would send it into a tailspin. Sodding Windows again, eh?

A reboot later and it’s reindexing, and I’ll try the Logic Pro instruments again. We’ll see how it goes anyway 😀

Update: It’s worked. Bed now.