Ouch, this would suck bigtime. I wonder how long they were down for? Good reason to choose the location of your server room wisely!
iPod won’t fast forward?
This morning our ipod mini suddenly stopped wanting to fast forward. To solve this I simply held down the select (center) button and the menu button together for 10 second. This causes the ipod to ‘reboot’ and after that the problem was solved. As a side note, clicking the select button while playing a song lets you fast forward and rewind with the scroll wheel, a definite plus when listening to hour long shows. Sometimes you just have to grit your teeth and read the manual. 😛
Reload an iMac with a dead cdrom
I got an Apple iMac on the weekend for cheap, the thing works except it’s cdrom won’t read discs properly. Since the cdrom in an iMac is slimline and integrated it’s not something you can swap out easily. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue but the system had no OS installed on it. I wanted a test OS X machine to test some backup software for work.
So I thought I’d just tear the thing apart and simply run a long ide cable outside the case to a normal cdrom drive and load OS X on it. No such luck, the slimline drive in the iMac has a strange compact IDE interface that doesn’t look compatible with either laptop ata or regular ata.
So I simply ran the primary IDE cable out of the case through the hole left by the extracted cdrom drive and put both the hard drive and the cdrom on the same ATA cable with the hard drive as master and the cdrom as slave. This worked fine except I couldn’t boot off the cdrom! I googled and found that the iMac will only boot off master devices.
So what did I do? Simple, I reversed the order! With the cdrom as master it let me boot off the OS X 10.3 cdrom, then I partitioned and installed the first stage of the OS X installer. When it came time to boot off the hard drive (after the first CD copies the base to the hard drive) I simply powered down, set the hard disk back to master and the CD as slave and voila! The install booted from the hard disk and continued on to disc 2 of the install. After the installer was all done and I was sure I didn’t need any more CD’s I shut down and re-assembled everything.
OS X 10.3.9 is not exactly screaming along on this machine but it’s fine for the script testing I have to do. Although I have to say, pink is not exactly my color.
Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 MCE remote
I recently purchased a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR 150 MCE (media center edition) kit for my mythtv box. Everything was pretty smooth using Knoppmyth R5A30 except the damned remote which refused to work. The remote that comes with this kit is described online as an MCE 2005 remote. It has RC6 printed on the back (I think its made by phillips) and the IR receiver is labeled SMK on the bottom.
I saw that the receiver was picked up by the kernel (dmesg) but the remote wasn’t passing any characters to mythtv. I started lircd and ran ‘irw’ to see what (if any) data was comming in from the remote. Nothing. So then I did a ps aux|grep lirc and realized that lirc wasn’t running. After another restart and the lirc process going away I took a look at the lirc rc script under /etc/init.d/lirc .
To get my lircd working properly I changed the following line in /etc/init.d/lirc :
start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –exec /usr/sbin/lircd — $LIRCD_ARGS \
to:
start-stop-daemon –start –quiet –exec /usr/sbin/lircd \
A simple /etc/init.d/lirc restart did the trick. Now running irw confirmed that the remote was sending data to the system properly. Woopie! More MythTV updates as I continue to get this system working. A proper MAME setup is next.
EDIT: For those of you that have been asking for my lircd.conf file, here it is.
“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”
Installing OS X 10.3 tonight and ran into this problem. I was installing to a 30Gb disk that used to have a copy of slackware on it so when I ran the installer I had to run the disk utility and erase the old disk. Once I resumed the install I received the error message:
“You cannot install Mac OS X on this volume. You cannot start your computer from this volume.”
After scratching my head for several minutes and re-trying the disk utility a couple times I decided that maybe it simply needed a reboot. Sure enough a reboot using the 10.3 install CD’s cured the problem. I hate non-descript errors, if a piece of software is not going to perform a function due to a problem it should tell you WHY. Anyway, easy enough fix.
EDIT Oct 26 2008: I experienced this issue again tonight while configuring a software raid on a G4 Tiger machine. After the raid was initialized I simply rebooted the machine and entered setup again, the installer allowed me to install on the raid partition after that.