Tuesday July 22
 
20:39
 
Bootcamp Just Works?

My Mac has been pissing me off lately. In Mac OS when I put the display to sleep, it has an irritating habit of waking again 10 seconds later. When I boot into Windows, the display never sleeps – it just goes to screensaver and stays there. It has been infuriating the hell out of me because unlike a laptop, if an iMac screen decides it is “on”, there is nothing you can do – no lid that you can close to say “no, you’re off buddy”.

Last night I was in Windows via Bootcamp and I couldn’t get the display to sleep. I ended up having to sleep the whole computer – something which I never do (because usually I have things running in the background). Something didn’t go right though, because this morning the computer was wide awake – and then when I rebooted to Mac OS and then later back to Windows, I received this error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll.

F*ck.

Couldn’t get into Windows via Bootcamp or VMWare Fusion. Reading around, missing hal.dll seemed a problem for Parallels, but I couldnt find anything related to sleep or bootcamp or VMWare Fusion.

Many results in Google basically said “I tried for hours to fix this and couldn’t – eventually had to reinstall XP”, so I wasn’t expecting to be able to solve this easily.. but thankfully it wasn’t that tricky. Hopefully these steps will be useful to other who have the hal.dll problem in bootcamp.

The problem basically came down to BOOT.INI being missing. When that happens, Windows defaults to WINNT for the Windows installation. My Windows installation (XP Pro SP2) is under the WINDOWS directory, so it couldn’t find hal.dll.

I fixed it by doing this to recreate the BOOT.INI file:

1. Put Windows XP install DVD in the Mac
2. Reboot and hold down the Option key, and then select the Windows DVD
3. Go into the recovery option
4. When the command prompt eventually appears, enter: bootcfg /Rebuild

One Windows installation was found and a new boot.ini file created. After reboot, Windows started normally.

The new boot.ini file contains this:

[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”XP Bootcamp”

I suspect simply creating a text file with that in it and placing it in the C drive would have had the same effect – but before following steps 1-4 above, I didn’t know what should be in the BOOT.INI file, so that wasn’t an option! I’m definitely keeping a copy of BOOT.INI handy in case this happens again, then hopefully recovery will be as simple as copying the file in place.

I have to wonder though – why did BOOT.INI disappear in the first place? Is it because I put Windows to sleep under bootcamp?

Tuesday June 10
 
23:45
 
Offensive

Dear lemonsoju,

Your post “Re: 10.5.3 problem with Aperture 2.1″ has been removed from Apple Discussions as  it provides information that violates the Apple End User License Agreement.

Offending post:

NVidia drivers have a huge history of being unreliable under Vista (the cause of the majority of reported Vista crashes in 2007), so I was wary about getting a Mac with an NVidia card. With the exception of Aperture, I have not had any problem though.

Aperture crashes every 15 minutes on my “hackintosh” (standard intel laptop running MacOS X). I thought that was just because the machine is a non-Apple machine – but since I also have the problem on my iMac, I would guess it is something related to the coding of Aperture rather than a specific graphics card.

For the moment I have abandoned Aperture.

Please see the Apple Discussions Terms of Use for more information on the appropriate use of Apple’s Discussion Forums.

http://discussions.apple.com/help.jspa#terms

Each Discussion User is required to agree to these terms before gaining posting privileges. You reserve the right to not post on Apple Discussions should you disagree with these terms.

Apple Discussions Staff

++++++++++
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Monday June 9
 
11:00
 
Free Flickr iPhoto plugin

Call me cheap – well, what do you expect from a Scot – but I really didn’t fancy paying 12 quid for the FlickrExport plugin.

Thankfully it seems I don’t need to – Dustin Li has written a free iPhoto to Flickr exporter/importer plugin. Splendid. I’ll be trying it out later.

How cheap am I? I even started looking at the Flickr API, thinking I’d write my own Perl script to keep flickr in sync with my iPhoto library. Rather than spend 12 quid, I’d have spent several hours of my free time writing code.

Typical tight Scot, eh?

Thursday June 5
 
13:22
 
Would You Trust Your Photos To An Application That Does This?

I thought Aperture was the solution to managing my photos – but on the first day using it, this corruption happened. There’s no way I’m trusting my photos to an application that does this.

Part 2 of my quest to find a photo organiser that works for me on the Mac.

Wednesday June 4
 
15:55
 
Photo Organisation On Macs

Or should that be “Photo Organization On Macs”? ;)

For years I’ve been organising my photos on Windows in a folder structure and archiving onto DVD, viewing the photos with a simple tool like ACDSee Classic (which allows lossless rotation). It works well for keeping photos safe, but not for browsing and searching. As I result, I tend to take a lot of photos, store them nicely away, but I don’t spend so much time viewing them – since it’s a pain to navigate between folders.

Now that I’m moving to Mac OS X, I want to try to find a way to make my photo viewing as pleasurable as my MP3 listening. iTunes changed the way I organise and browse my MP3s, making it easier to mark favourites, find the songs I’m looking for, etc – I’m looking for something that will give me the same “revolution” when it comes to organising my photos.

With 100GB of past photos only made sense of by the folders they are in, however, that’s not an easy task. It starts here: part 1 of my adventure trying photo organisation software on the Mac.