Troubleshooting

Measuring Local Network Performance

Adam Knight — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 19:58:48 -0600

Startup Troubleshooting

JC — Fri, 23 Feb 2007 00:00:00 -0600

Recovering From a Failed Secure Erase Free Space

Adam Knight — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 16:20:23 -0600

Sometimes, when using the erase free space function of Disk Utility, the process will be interrupted by a crash, hang, power outage, or small mammal urinating on the power supply. Should this happen, you’ll find that your disk has suddenly lost the majority of its free space and nothing you do in the GUI will show you where it is. No amount of checking the disk will bring it back, because it’s not a catalog problem.

Disk Utility accomplishes the erase feature by creating large sparse image files in a preset directory. It then deletes them with the srm tool (secure remove) and an overwrite pattern of your choice. If Disk Utility is interrupted, this sparse image is left on the disk just taking up space. Starting another free space erase session makes another file, instead of cleaning up the previous one. So, as there are no checks in Disk Utility for cleaning up this failed process, so you have to hunt it down manually. There's more »

Fixing Duplicate Application Names in the Open With Menu

Adam Knight — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 02:30:35 -0600

Problems with Sony DVD Recorders and SONATA_VOLUME Discs

Adam Knight — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 00:00:53 -0600

When The Boot Camp Assistant Fails

JC — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 21:34:03 -0600

For a variety of reasons, the Boot Camp Assistant sometimes fails to let you do the things you want to do. It doesn’t work, for instance, if your drive is already partitioned. Many early adopters partitioned their drives before Boot Camp, hoping for an eventual dual boot solution either from Apple or elsewhere. In my case, I used Boot Camp to repartition my hard drive, then used that partition to install another copy of OS X for a test. Unfortunately, Boot Camp Assistant refused to reclaim that partition when I was done. That’s 20GB down the drain!

GPT Mangling for Dummies

Apple includes a utility called gpt for mangling with the GPT headers on your drive. Unfortunately, this specific utility requires you to unmount all volumes on a disk before it will work, but that’s not a huge barrier. Reboot to your OS X Install CD or to another Tiger volume and use Disk Utility to unmount (but not eject) all volumes on the disk in question. There's more »

Email Aliases in Mac OS X Server

Adam Knight — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 16:45:38 -0500

Flushing the DNS Cache

Adam Knight — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 10:54:20 -0500

The Other Things Your Mac Does

Adam Knight — Sun, 17 Sep 2006 02:45:05 -0500

Quickie Removal of AppleDouble-Encoded Resource Forks

Adam Knight — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 01:23:34 -0500