Friday, May 16, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast and lowfat cherry yogurt. I called AppleCare this morning to fix the problem I had yesterday with the mouse and keyboard not working in Boot Camp 2.1. The first time I call I work my way through the voice greetings and the automated voice eventually says, "Okay, I'll send you to a specialist—hang on." I immediately hear a fast busy signal. Argh! I hang up, wait a few minutes, and then call back again. When I reach the same point as last time, I'm expecting to hear the fast busy signal, but instead I hear 2 really loud beeps that hurt my ear, and then I hear someone say something but there is so much noise and static on the line that I can barely hear him. I tell him that I can't hear because of noise on the line and hang up. Argh! I'm ready to give up and send an email to our Apple rep, but then my phone rings, and it's the Apple specialist I was speaking to before but now the noise is gone. We discuss the laptop problem, and his first suggestion is to call VMware, but then I tell him I had the problem before I installed Fusion—Fusion actually let me get back into Windows when Boot Camp could not—and that's when he suggested that there was nothing else we could do and I must wipe everything and reinstall OS X and Boot Camp and Windows from scratch. I say nothing for a few seconds in response and then ask him if reinstalling the keyboard and mouse drivers from by Leopard DVD might work. He says yes, that might work and could I give him maybe 4 minutes for him find out how to do that? I agree. While waiting, I perform the steps he went to go look up. I think I perform the steps successfully (the installers for the keyboard and mouse drivers don't indicate success or no success), but the problem remains. All this time he has my call on hold (!). Maybe 13 minutes after he placed my call on hold I give up on him and hang up. Within seconds, I receive email messages from Steve and Stephen at Apple with links to information that does not help. Apple Technical Support is very disappointing today. I start in OS X, start Fusion, start XP, then open the Device Manager in the System control panel. There are a number of items that say "Unknown device" or something like that. I uninstall all of them then restart XP (within Fusion). Upon logging back in, Windows wants to reinstall of the devices. I select Continue Anyway for all of them. For the floppy it had to automatically search for the correct driver, but eventually it found it. I logged back in to XP within Fusion and confirmed all hardware in the Device Manager appeared normal. I start up in Boot Camp, but the problem remains. I boot into OS X and back up data. I remove the Windows partition. Attempted to register for Adobe Reader distribution so that I can include it on our software cdrom for entering students, but when I clicked the email confirmation link, I received the following error message: "An Error Has Been Encountered - Configuration softdistribute4validateUNIQUECODEwwwadobecom not found! (check conf field or file) - We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause. This error has been logged and we will be fixing it shortly." where UNIQUECODE was a unique code for me. More software licensing: Flash, Shockwave. Lunch with Melissa H and Joel at Pacific Catch: sweet potato fries, shrimp tempura roll, spicy tuna roll, hawaiian poke. Back to laptop maintenance: When I restart, I am surprised that Boot Camp is not smart enough to have reset the default startup volume back to OS X—I see a DOS screen complaining that there is no boot volume, but perhaps this is by design for some reason I cannot think of right now. I cold restart holding the Option key and get back into OS X. I select the only available option—Macintosh HD—and then OS X starts successfully. Back to Boot Camp Assistant to create a new Windows partition and install XP SP2. Regarding Chris's laptop problem from yesterday, I now believe that the mouse and keyboard freezes are due to heat. Back to the shared office MacBook laptop. During partitioning, I got the multi-language translucent black screen with power button saying I needed to restart. I restart. Upon logging in to OS X, a dialog appears asking to send a problem (panic) report to Apple: "hfs_lock: locking against myself!" I send the report. I reopen Boot Camp Assistant and click Continue on the first screen. I get an error message: "The startup disk does not have enough space to be partitioned. You must have at least 10 GB of free space available. (OK)." I quit Boot Camp Assistant and start Disk Utility. Capacity of my hard drive is 55.6 GB. Free space available is 4.5 GB. I know I had more than that before and after removing the bad Windows partition. I search Google on "The startup disk does not have enough space to be partitioned" and find a number of threads. The best thing to try sounds like to insert the Leopard DVD and repair disk, so I do that. Disk Utility finds "invalid volume free block count" followed later by "The volume Macintosh HD was repaired successfully." I restart. Back to Boot Camp Assistant. Gave Windows a 12 GB partition, leaving OS X with 12 GB free. Regarding the PharmAdMIT 2008 error 1705 from yesterday, Chris F sends another message today saying that the problem was caused by update 951207 from Microsoft on the recent Patch Tuesday. I worked around the problem by uninstalling the patch related to KB950113 (950113) and turning off Automatic Updates. Back to the shared office laptop: Partition succeeded, and Boot Camp Assistant properly prompted me to insert my Windows cdrom and click Start Installation which I did. XP installation proceeds. While waiting for XP to install, I work on web edits for Carol. Made live new Flash slideshow on the School of Pharmacy home page. Eric D did the Flash work for this, and I think it looks great. Continued Windows XP installation. Ensured Automatic Updates was turned off for Joel.