This is my first post from the blogger app on my iPad. Testing 123


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This is my first update from my brand spanking new iPhone 4.

It was a long hard road, including trying to go to the mall on launch day without a pre-order only to find a 3 mile long line. Then going back to the apple store later that day to fine that they were sold out of non pre-ordered phones. My next choice was to place an order with apple.com and wait 3 painful weeks.

I got my shipping notification on Saturday the 10th and was super excited only to find that it was shipping from China and that the estimated delivery date was still July 15th.

I had been watching the FedEx site all week waiting for the arrival of my little gem. Today was the day, i got up early and check the status to find that it was out for delivery! I made sure Bethany would be home to receive the package and called or texted her every hour from work to see if it had arrived. She would inform me every time and very regretfully that it had not. I am not sure if it was sympathy or if it was that she was regretful that she new that i would be calling her again shortly.

Then I got the call, Bethany called me to tell me that ..... u guessed it ... the Fed Ex guy had rang the broken door bell and left a failed delivery attempt note on the door! SADNESS!! So I had to wait another 4 painful hours until I could go pick it up from the FedEx distribution hub. 6:55pm I was at the door of the FedEx store and by 7:05 I FINALLY had my new baby in my hands. I took it home and set it all up. Then we heard fireworks! Yes, thats right, the entire community was sooo happy for me and my new iPhone they actually had a fireworks display set up for me! Bethany and I ran outside and I took my trusty new gadget with me to film the show. After all if they are gonna put on a show just for me then I had better film it so i can prove it to future generations! Once filmed I downloaded and installed the new iMovie app for the iphone and made some edits, added music and a title and am uploading it here for everyone's viewing pleasure. I am still learning how to use that app, it is not as "out of the box easy" as I had hoped but i am sure it will be easy once I figure it out.

PS the whole post was done from my iPhone 4 and my Apple Bluetooth KB.

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It has been a long time coming but i finally got around to cleaning up my Picasa library and updating my online albums. Check them out, Nicholas is getting sooo big!

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With my new Hackentosh up and running on my secondary 160 gig hard drive and everything working as intended it was finally time to merge that data over to the 1TB drive and blow away everything windows on my desktop. I didn't want to have to go through the painful process of reinstalling osx since I already spend the day doing that last month. I did some searching and found the amazing and simple SuperDuper! app would do exactly what I needed.

Not only was this application simple to use but it is FREE. All I had to do was launch the app, choose my source drive and choose my destination drive and sit back and watch the magic happen. It took several hours to copy everything but I just ran it overnight and when I came down in the morning I had an exact duplicate of my OS drive.

Next I just had to run the EFI boot tool on the drive and reboot. I now have my fully functional hackentosh desktop completely windows free and fully operational.

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I am posting this blog with my iPhone on a new Apple BT keyboard now that iPhone OS4 supports pairing BT keyboards with iPhone devices. I like the fact that i can type faster as i would on a laptop but i am not sure the function is a keeper yet. I will have to try some of the office apps out there to see if it is worth just toting a BT keyboard to a meeting to take notes as opposed to my netbook or laptop.

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After several failed attempts to read the ext2 partition on my old NAS drive I decided it was time to go to the old Linux partition and copy the files from there. It was a fun adventure that took me back to my college days of multiple terminal windows and text flying down the screen Matrix style. All in all I hope it will be worth it.

I wanted to get a Linux partition without doing a full install. I downloaded a neat app called Universal USB Installer and then downloaded a KNOPPIX V6.2 image. This allows you to do a full install of Linux on the USB drive. Booting to the drive will give you a fully functioning copy of Linux allowing me to do my file copy with ease.

First step was to make the USB boot drive. I grabbed my spare 4GB thumb drive and launched the Universal USB Installer application. When you run the installer it will ask for the ISO image you want to install, I selected the Knoppix image i downloaded and created a boot flash drive.

Second Step was booting to Knoppix, this went very smooth for my desktop, after booting to the USB drive it came up right away and detected my network card and grabbed an IP all without issues.

Now it was time to mount the old hard drive, mount the network drive, then copy the files. To accomplish this I did the following:

First, find the source drive by running the following command:

fdisk -1

I found that the disk I wanted was /dev/sdc2

Now I create a mountpoint for the drive by running the following command:

mkdir /mnt/sdc2

Then I Mounted the drive to that mountpoint. I had an issue when I tried to just run the basic mount command. The drive was part of a mirror and Linux refused to mount it, after some Googleing I found that I had to specify the file-system in the mount command and it worked no problem. I ran the following command:

mount -t ext2 /dev/sdc2 /mnt/sdc2

Next I created the mountpoint for the network share:

mkdir /mnt/network

Then I mounted the network share:

/smbmount //192.168.1.32/Volume_1 /mnt/network

Finally, I ran the Rsync command that would take everything from the source and move it to the destination. The source was /mnt/sdc2 and the destination was /mnt/network

rsync -auv --delete /mnt/sdc2 /mnt/network

I am letting this run overnight to see if it will finish the copy. Since Linux fully supports the ext2 file-system and since it has already gone further then it did in windows I fully expect it to finish. I will post again with final results.

I have lots of movies to watch this weekend, it better work!

*edit - 8 hours later and it is still copying!

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When I left off last night, I had installed my new drives in my NAS and formatted one of the 2 drives. When the Dlink DNS-323 told me that it had to format the second drive after finishing the first, which took 30 min, I decided that I could not wait any longer and would pick up in the morning before work. While the first drive was formatting I moved one of the old drives from the NAS to my desktop and installed Linux Reader, a tool that would allow my Windows 7 PC read the EXT2 partition on the hard drives.

I woke up this morning all set to begin my 1TB file transfer so it could run while I was at work. I came down stairs, fired up the Windows 7 partition on my PC and launched the Linux Reader application.

I selected the drive that I wanted to restore and told it to copy over to the new partition on the NAS. I left for work hoping that Windows would not jam up and that I would have a nice clean copy of my files on the NAS ready for my use.

There is a reason people like me switch from PC to MAC ....

Apparently the 970GB file copy was a bit too much to handle and it crapped out at about 15% in. I did some more research and tried to find a solution that would allow me to use OSX to mount the drive and copy it over but everything I see is not compatible with Snow Leopard. I decided to give this Linux Reader another try but I am going to restore 1 folder at a time hope that it doesn't crash out again.

2 hours later ... no go. The next step is to get a Linux boot disk made and boot into a Linux OS and try to get the copy running that way. I love how this would have worked in any other version of windows or any other version of OSX but Windows 7 and Snow Leopard are incompatible. I suspect my next blog entry will be, "Running Linux on an MSIx58 with an Intel i7".

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