Recovering from a harddrive crash

Well, my harddrive died in my main machine a few weeks back.  I sent it in under warrarnty for repair and got it back this week.  HOWEVER, I then spent most of the week and all of Sunday getting everything back in place.  Its a dual boot iMac with OS-X and Win7 setup.  I had Time Machine OSX backups and a Windows Home Server backup of Win7 before the drive died.   So I should be safe and quickly back running, right?  NO!!! The comedy of errors I ran into during the restore are as follows:

1. The Time Machine restore failed with some obscure -36 error that could not be found online anywhere.  I ended up reinstalling OSX clean and then using Migration Assistant to use the Time Machine backup to transfer settings and apps.  That worked flawlessly but took several evenings to get through.
2. Now on to Windows, note the number of problems in relation to OSX.
3. The WHS restore CD could not find my network card so there was no way to restore Win7 off the network from my WHS.
4. I now went off on a wild goose chase for half a day and restored the backup to a USB drive from a nother PC.  However I was never able to find a way to copy it over onto the iMac harddrive.  I even bought a partition copy app, but that wouldn’t work for some strange reason.  Sent in a request for my money back on that one.
5. Eventually, I found out that the backup process saves off your drivers into a directory and you can add them in during the restore boot up to fix this.  I did that but It didn’t work.  After some more web searching, I found out that the restore CD is 32 bit and if you have a 64bit OS backup those drivers are useless.  The backup must just save them for fun, STUPID!!!!  So how do I get the right drivers?  Well since that version of WinPE is really Vista 32 bit I installed a fresh copy of Vista 32 bit in Bootcamp, updated to the Apple drivers and then started another WHS backup just to get the drivers directory created. 
6. Next I reboot back into the WHS restore CD and add the Vista 32 bit drivers and tada it recognized the network card but now it wont find the WHS to get the backup.  Do another web search and find out that sometimes that happens because of DNS issues and you should really just disconnect the network cables from the router and direct connect the WHS and the PC.  Another reboot later and I’m finally restoring!!!!

That last bit took most of the weekend but now my machine is back to functional.  Moral of the story: the more cool toys you have and the more you tweak them out the more you spend time fixing them and doing nothing else productive.

Traveling with my devices

Thanksgiving is my second trip with no laptop and just an iPad and a Zune HD. This time instead of an iPhone I have my new Win7 phone. As usual the iPad was flawless and i never really missed having a laptop. Even writing this via free wifi on the flight worked pretty well. Heck I even bought my parents a laptop for Christmas while mid air.

I have the same movies and videos on my iPad as I do the Zune, thanks to AirVideo and Handbrake. Jo watched several of the Harry Potter movies on the iPad on the first flight while I watched Watchmen on the Zune. In the hotel I always use the Hd docking station and connect to the tv. Our hotel had tubes which sucked but one of the TVs had a front av connection so we were able to watch stuff on the tv while in the room. I do this wherever we go and it’s awesome. Small travel footprint with a remote. The Zune rules especially since it can play mp4s.

The phone really did fine as well. No real major iPhone withdrawals. I have my essential apps for Google Reader syncing and Fandango. Mail works well. Since I don’t yet have an sd card in it I had limited media but I listened to music a few times. I have experienced lockups several times playing media however and the apps are very early ones. I hope this gets better or the iPhone might be coming back out.

New iMac and the slow Windows File Share discovery

So I finally did it and bought a new 27 inch iMac quad core to be my primary machine.  I did the whole deal and upgraded Parallels to the new version 6.0 and installed a fresh lovely copy of Win 7 inside of it, complete with Zune.  Everything works great.  The machine flies and Win 7 is very happy and responsive running all the time and going full screen whenever I need it to.  Only one problem so far.   Browsing video files on my Windows Home Server is dog slow.  Its horrible.  I can access them fine in the Win 7 VM so its not a network issue I think.  I’m also seeing issues with the AirVideo server streaming those videos.  Its bugging me.  I assume its the video codec.   After trying many versions of DivX decoders its not any better.  My support mails to AirVideo give me the clue that its because of the network share.  I remove that from AirVideo and now the local shares work fine with AirVideo.  Hmmm, not the codec.    Then I do a better web search and see if anyone else is having problems.  Low and behold I find this little gem.

sudo sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0

Amazing!!! It works immediately.  I’m literally looking at a finder windows flying through thumbnails.  Ofcourse I tried switching back to the default value of 3 to see what it does and it slows down again.  Freaky.  Well now I have that working.   Unix systems are so command line geeky.

iPad upgrade to 4.2 Beta 3

I finally had a few moments to upgrade my iPad to the latest iOS beta 4.2 Beta 3.  Too early to tell if its better but I definitely love the unified inbox and threading support.  Multitasking is no great think just like the iPhone version.  However the upgrade scared the crap out of me.  After the first phase iTunes locked up and failed the respond.  I had to force quit it and I thought I might have bricked the device.  However luckily a restart of iTunes and a few moments later and everything appears fine.