Crabtree Consulting

The official way to get MacOS 10.7 Lion is to download it from the App Store or buy a computer with it preinstalled. What if I want to make a bootable DVD? Here’s what you do:

Download the installer (almost four gig!) from the App Store.
Once finished, CTRL+click and choose Show Package Contents
Open the Contents folder
Open SharedSupport and find InstallESD.dmg
Right-click (CTRL+click) on InstallESD.dmg drag it to a convenient location (such as the Desktop)
Fire up Disk Utility (/Applications/Utilities)
Click Burn, select InstallESD.dmg from your convenient location and click Burn
Find a recordable DVD disc and pop it in the optical drive (yes, you need an optical drive to do this) and click Burn

Not only does this give you a backup of the download (so you won’t have to download it again), but it also gives you a handy way to install Lion onto another Mac you own. (Legally Apple allows you five installs to machines with the same Apple ID.)

Upgrading to MacOS 10.7 (Lion)? My battery lasted about half as long as it used to once I upgraded. I went to Utilities -> Console and had a huge list of messages in the system query log. I found that Little Snitch wasn’t compatible with Lion and kept “respawning” every 10 seconds. Then I found that Adobe Air was being denied access to a file it wanted to read. I removed Little Snitch and Adobe Air and my battery life is again excellent. Watch out for incompatible programs!

If you decide to upgrade to Lion, ProPresenter won’t work right away.

I upgraded and ProPresenter crashed immediately. So I went to the Renewed Vision website and downloaded the latest version (4.2.5). This version would hang on boot up every time I tried to launch it. I had to fix it by deleting the Renewed Vision App Support folder. Lion now has this hidden. Quit ProPresenter. To locate the folder, click on the desktop and press Command-Shift-G. Then type: ~/Library/Application Support/. Then delete the “RenewedVision” folder.

Now it works!

Here is one of the high speed pitching analysis videos that I shot for the Westerville Warhawks.

By filming from two angles and recording at a high frame rate, we can analyze the mechanics of your athletes. For more info, click here.

Apple tends to fit many Macs with small-ish hard drives. Now to be fair the Mac apps also tend to be smaller than Windows equivalents so you may not need a bigger drive. But if you work with a lot of media (pictures, videos, music) you’ll run out of space eventually.

So how do you replace the hard drive in a Mac? I’ll show you:

- First, use Time Machine to make a backup of your system. This can either be to a USB external hard drive or to a network drive. (You might be able to use a Firewire drive too, but I’ve never tried.)

- Once the backup is complete, it is time to replace the hard drive. Now there are way too many configurations for me to explain exactly how to replace the physical drive. In my unibody MacBook Pro, I remove the screws on the bottom, take the bottom panel off, and the drive is right there. You’ll likely find a similar configuration for other modern Macs. Look around on Youtube for instructions for your specific Mac model. Keep in mind that you will likely need a jewelers screwdriver set and you may need some tiny torx drivers.

- Once the new drive is installed, boot the Mac using the MacOS system disc. Open the Disk Utility and select the new hard drive on the left. (If the drive has an existing partition, be sure to click on the drive, not the partition.) Then click on “Partition” at the top. Click on the Options button. Choose GUID and click OK. Then make sure to select Format: Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and click Apply.

- Once done with setting up the new drive, open Time Machine and restore the backup. If you used a USB external drive for the backup, it should easily find the backup and restore it. If you stored it on a network drive, you will have to connect to the network and mount the drive to restore the backup.

Give it several hours to restore but once it does you will be up and running with your new hard drive! (And if something doesn’t work you can pop the old drive back in since none of the data was harmed.)

I had a PC running at my house that was running a web server, ftp server and performing some other tasks so it was turned on 24 hours per day. It ran for about 3 years in this state. I finally decided to turn it off and after three days of being turned off, it won’t turn back on. I suspect that the power supply is bad, but it could also be a problem with the motherboard. I’ll do a little troubleshooting soon to find out exactly what failed, but I am posting this here to remind you to be prepared for this situation. If you have a PC that runs 24/7, you should have some spare hardware sitting around to throw into if necessary (extra power supply, hard drive, etc). And make sure you back up that data so that it can be moved to another machine in a hurry!

Hard drive capacity is astonishing! 1 terabyte drives are available for about $100. But if you consider that you can store 1 terabyte of data on something that only costs $100, you begin to realize that data integrity might become an issue.

If you’ve had a modern hard drive fail, you know just how much data you can lose very easily. I had a 500 gigabyte drive fail last year and it took several months for me to realize what I had lost. It was easy to dump pictures, music, videos, and documents on that drive when my other drives were getting full. Then one day I heard clicking coming from my computer room and poof! 500 gigabytes of data was gone.

Hard disk drives are no less susceptible to failure than they were 10 years ago. And since we have the ability to store so much data on a single drive we have a higher chance of losing a lot of data!

Regular backups are as important as ever since we can store so much data on a single drive. There are many ways to backup your data… some are more elegant than others. The old tape drive is still available but mainly only used in corporate environments due to the price and lack of speed. But with terabyte drives available for $100 it might make sense to simply make a copy of your data on another external hard drive at regular intervals given the price of drives.

Other options include online storage, flash drives, and RAID arrays and one of these options may make sense for your situation. But don’t wait! Get your backup solution working before you hard drive fails!