HOWTO - Clone your Mac OS X hard drive

May 22nd, 2008 at 12:16 · Filed Under Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Mac OS X · 8 Comments 

First of all, why do I need to clone the hard drive? Good question though. Here are a few possible answers:

  1. I have too much money to spend for a spare hard drive to clone my Mac hard drive.
  2. I want to have a bootable external hard drive, installing on an external USB hard drive is not possible.
  3. I want to upgrade my Mac’s hard drive, and I don’t want to do the installations and setup all over again

Obviously number 3 is my answer. I acquired a bigger capacity hard drive to upgrade my current 120GB hard drive in my MacBook. After some Googling around, I found an answer.

There is an Apple utility program called Apple restore or asr located in /usr/sbin. Connect your external USB hard drive and format it using Disk Utility. Open the Terminal in Applications -> Utilities. Type the following command line into the Terminal to copy your hard drive over your external drive.

% sudo asr -source /Volumes/OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME/ -target /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/

Replace “OSX BOOT VOLUME NAME” and “TARGET VOLUME NAME” with actual volume names. asr will take quite some time to copy the contents of hard drive to external hard drive. Get a cuppa, pop in your iPod earphone and relax.

When asr completes the execution, it will print a message:

asr: did not copy blessed information to target, which may have missing or out-of-date blessed folder information.

Then, bless your target drive with this:

% sudo bless -folder /Volumes/TARGET VOLUME NAME/System/Library/CoreServices

Now, the hard drive is bootable. Restart your Mac and hold down “option” key. A screen will appear allowing to choose which volume to boot from.

Tags: , ,

Another happy new Mac user

May 21st, 2008 at 16:19 · Filed Under Blogging, Business, Mac OS X · Comment 

To follow up my article, “Am I a Mac advocate?”

Just came back from a business meeting which I delivered an Apple MacBook to a customer. She is a mutual fund manager and is totally new to Apple. The moment she took out her new MacBook from the box, her impression was “Wow! It is so beautiful, sleek and … “, something words could not describe.

I spent some hours to guide her using a Mac and she caught on quite well. She was most impressed when I showed her how I could help her using her Mac via iChat. Totally amazed, how iChat could allow her to share her screen to me and I could guide her to use her Mac and some applications over the Internet.

Another happy Mac user.

Tags:

HOWTO - Installing gnat-4.3 on Mac OS X

October 4th, 2007 at 23:15 · Filed Under Ada, Call Me a Geek, Computing, HOWTO, Hacking, Mac OS X, Software Development · 4 Comments 

Perhaps someone has written this before but it seems no where to be found. So I just write a simple HOWTO about installing gnat-4.3 on Mac OS X.

My installation is on MacBook 2.16GHz Intel Core 2 Duo running Mac OS 10.4.10 with Xcode 2.4.1. Pre-requisition is to have Xcode installed before installing gnat-4.3.

  1. Go to MacAda.org to download gnat-4.3 and other necessary tools. Launch the installation in the disk image.
  2. Make the following softlinks: 
    
$ ln -s /usr/local/ada-4.3/bin/gcc /usr/bin/gcc-4.3
$ ln -s /usr/local/ada-4.3/bin/g++ /usr/bin/g++-4.3
  3. Launch gcc_select: 
    
$ sudo gcc_select 4.3

Tags: , , ,