Tag Archives: MacOSX

fixed : FREE application for cloning a Mac HD

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Question :

I need to make an exact (bootable) copy of my secondary Mac’s startup-HD. Someone suggested me to use an application called Carbon Copy Cloner, but since I am running OSX 10.8 Mountain Lion on my primary Mac, I would need to use Carbon Copy Cloner version 3.5 or newer, but that’s not free software any longer…

As I only need to do this once, I’m not willing to pay more than €5 to be able to do so. What’s the best alternative ?

Answer :

The best alternative for making a bootable clone version of a Mac startup-HD is what you already have : Disk Utility …and best of all : it’s completely FREE.

Here’s how to do so :

– connect both HDs to your Mac (using USB or FireWire for example)

– on your Mac, open the Disk Utilities application (which can be found inside the folder called Utilities which is in the Applications folder)

– you will now see both HDs appear on the left side of the Disk Utility window (they will be listed as the disk size followed by the manufacturer name and some additional info, directly below them the name of the partitions on it are listed – on Macs there’s normally only one partition per HD)

– on the rest of the page (middle & right), you will see 5 chapter buttons : “First Aid”, “Erase”, “Partition”, “RAID” and “Restore”

– click on the “Restore”-chapter button

– now put the cursor in the white area behind “Source:” and then click on the partition you want to copy in the menu on the left

– then put the cursor in the white area behind “Destination:” and in the menu on the left, click on the HD (or on the partition) you want to copy to (or drag & drop it from there onto the

– if for some reason your chosen Source or Destination now lists something else than what you would like, just try again

– then click on the “Restore” button that’s bottom right

– …now all you have to do is wait (using USB 2.0, about 10GB of used disk space will be cloned in about 10 minutes)

– when the cloning is finished, both HD’s will have the same name, and therefore might not properly mount at the same time, so only one will be visible on your Desktop

– use the ‘drag disk to Trash’ procedure (or the eject-icon next to the HD’s listing), and unmount both HDs

– then plug just one HD back in to make it visible on your Desktop, and check if the cloning went okay (by browsing though it in the Finder)

– then eject the first HD, and check the second HD the same way

– that’s it !

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Note :

You can quickly check if the HD you’ve cloned is bootable, by connecting it to your Mac using a USB cable and then restarting your Mac with the ALT-key pressed

…that will enable you to choose any connected HD as the startup drive

if the cloned HD turns out not to be bootable, plug it into your Mac again, and use Disk Utility to check if the Partition Map Scheme is ‘GUID’ (it should not be ‘Apple’ !), if it’s not, re-partition the HD and do the cloning process again

info : I can’t get write-permission to external harddisk from Windows-user

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Question :

A Windows-user asked me to put some file on his external harddisk, but when I try to do so, I get a message that I only have ‘read-only’ permissions to the harddisk.

How can I copy the files over ?

Answer :

If you get this problem, it usually caused by the fact that MacOSX does not support NTFS-formatted disks ‘out of the box’. [ NTFS = Windows NT File System ; a format that, mainly for server, has replaced the old DOS-originating formats FAT16 and FAT32, which are fully supported by MacOSX, but are less suited for use on large volume harddisks ]

There are 2 main solutions to this :

– 1 –

If you are going to frequently swap this external harddisk between your Mac and a Windows-PC, you’ll be best off reformatting it to FAT32 :

– connect the external harddisk to your Mac

– copy the entire contents over to your Mac (or to another external harddisk or to a diskimage on your Mac)

– check and make sure you have copied everything over

– then reformat the external harddisk to DOS-format (= FAT32) using OSX’s Disk Utility app

– when finished, copy all content that originally was on the external harddisk back on to it

– that’s it !

– 2 –

If it’s only a one-off for you to use this NTFS-formatted harddrive, you’re probably better off installing a special NTFS-driver/utility for OSX.

– download Tuxera NTFS (to use in demo-mode) :

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/33122/tuxera-ntfs

– install Tuxera NTFS, and open it (NOTE : it’s not a regular application, so it can’t be found in your Applications folder, but it’s a Control Panel in the System Preferences)

– now the external NTFS-disk should appear on your Mac in read&write-mode, and you can start copying files onto it

If you run into problems using Tuxera NTFS, read the FAQ :

http://www.tuxera.com/products/tuxera-ntfs-for-mac/faq/#startup-disk

And if you do exceed the 15 day free Demo-mode of Tuxera NTFS and are not willing to upgrade to the full payed version, you can start using the FREE open source program that is at the origin of Tuxera NTFS ; it’s called  NTFS-3G and can be downloaded here :

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/24481/ntfs-3g

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fixed : select photos of only one camera in iPhoto

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Question :

I have imported various new photos from my digital camera into iPhoto some days ago. Today I found out that I had forgotten to adjust the daylight savings time on the camera. I would now like to select the photos of this particular camera only, and adjust the time stamp (a.k.a. EFIX data). But there’s no option to do so in iPhoto…

How do I do that ?

Answer :

Even though there’s no option in iPhoto to select photos based on included info about the camera that took them (a.k.a. based on “Camera Data”), it’s not too hard to do so anyway by creating a Smart Album.

– in iPhoto, go to “File” in the top menu bar, then select “New Smart Album” from the pulldown menu

– in the drop down panel that appears, start by typing a name for the new Smart Album (e.g. “Camera X photos”)

– then set the following using the three multiplechoice-buttons “Camera Model” “is” “[your camera X model]”

– if you want to only filter out photos that were made after a certain date, you should set another rule to do so

– then click on the “OK”-button

– an album folder icon accompanied by a gear-wheel (a.k.a. “sprocket”) will now appear on the left menu, click on it to open it

– then select one of the photos in that folder and press [CMD]+[A] to select all photos in that folder

– then go to “Photos” in the top menu bar, and select “Adjust Date And Time” from the pulldown-menu

– in the drop down panel that appears, type the time that you want to change the first photo’s time to in the field behind “Adjusted:” ; the exact same time change that you set here for the first photo will be implemented to all selected photos

– I would suggest putting a checkmark in front of “Modify original files”, but this is not essential

– then click on the “Adjust”-button

– to clean up, right-click (or CTRL-click) on the Smart Album folder in the left menu and select “Delete Album” from the popup list [this will delete the Smart Album, but the individual photos will remain in their original location]

– that’s it…

tip : easily make FREE screen recordings in MacOSX

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“Screen Recording” means making a video of your screen (i.e. your MacOSX Desktop) while you are using it.

This is a way to make tutorial video’s which you can use to send or give to others, just like the ones you find on YouTube.

(…or you can use this to record online video’s that you can not download)

“Screen Recording” used to be something that would require rather expensive software, but with the introduction of QuickTime X Player in OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard, it’s a simple and completely FREE feature included in MacOSX !

Here’s how to :

– open the “QuickTime Player” application (or maybe it’s called “QuickTime X Player” in your case)

– go to “File” and select “New Screen Recording” from the pulldown menu – or use the key-combo [SHIFT]+[CMD]+[N]

– in the small (shaded) screen that appears, you will see a record-button (with a red dot) in the middle and a grey triangle button on the right

– click on the grey triangle button and you can select your audio input source (e.g. a microphone you’ll be using for your voice-over comments), output video quality and whether you want record your mouse movements and clicks in the video also

– then click on the red-dotted record-button to start recording, but when you do so you will get the option to either select a (static) part of the screen [by dragging the cursor over the area you want to select for recording] or the entire screen [by clicking anywhere on the screen]

– recording will start right away after you’ve made your choice (so do not forget to start talking if you want a voice-over)

– to stop recording, go back to the record-button (which now shows a small black square) and click it

– the recording will stop and it will take a few moments for QuickTime X Player to process it (the longer your recorded, the more time the processing will take)

– the recording will be visible in a QuickTime X Player window right away

– to Save or Share your screen recording, go “File” and choose one of the following :

option 1. “Export” (= normal Save) for saving as a QuickTime .mov-file [you can set the video quality from the “Format” pulldown menu ; either (general) Movie, 480p, 720p or iPhone/iPad/AppleTV ready

option 2. “Export to” to directly upload to a website, import into iTunes or edit in iMovie

option 3. “Share” to directly share your screen recording with your friends through eMail, iMessage (= Apple SMS), AirDrop (= Apple WiFi-filesharing), Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo or Flickr

That’s it ; this might seem rather complicated from these instructions, but it’s actually really simple once you try 😉

fixed : “Service Battery” warning

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Question :

When I started up my Mac today, and looked at the battery indicator in the top menu bar, I noticed that there was something unusual… so when I clicked on it, the pull down menu did not show the usual battery info. It showed a warning saying “Service Battery”.

As I do not believe my battery is dead, this looks like a bug to me… is it ? And what can I do about it ?

Answer :

The “Service Battery” message (a.k.a. warning) just indicated that your battery has not been calibrated for a long time… this might occur when you have not once fully used your battery ; you have not used your fully charged battery until it was completely empty once in the last three months… this is noting serious, you just need to do so again.

More on this can be found on Apple’s website :

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1490

In short, for any MacBook or MacBook Pro that has a removable battery, the battery calibration routine is :

1- plug in the power cord and charge until the battery is fully loaded (so until the LED-light in the connector stays green) [ during this you can still use your Mac ]

2- leave the power cord connected for at least 2 more hours [ during this you can still use your Mac also ]

3- unplug the power cord and leave your MacBook (MacBook Pro) running until the battery is empty [ during this you can also keep using your Mac, but remember to save all your open work when you get a warning that your battery is nearly empty ]

4- when your MacBook (MacBook Pro) goes to sleep when the battery is completely empty, just let it.

5- then let your MacBook (MacBook Pro) ‘rest’ for at least 5 hours

6- when the 5 hours are over, reconnect the power cord and fully charge your battery again [ during this you can use your Mac, in a normal, modest way, just don’t exaggerate : use as little applications at the same time as possible and shut down any non-vital applications that are running in the background ]

That should be it, but if it doesn’t work for you, you might want to try this :

Resetting the System Management Controller (SMC)

More info on doing so, can be found on Apple’s website :

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3964

And if that doesn’t help either, you will probably have a non-original Apple battery, or if you do have an original Apple-battery, it is probably broken due to falling or shock.

Either way, you’ll probably need to buy a new battery… [ note : from experience, I can tell that an original Apple-battery is better value-for-money even though the price is high ; imitation batteries usually start out right, but then suddenly die within about one year… ]

fixed : Time Machine backup error “sparsebundle in use”

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Question :

When Time Machine tried to backup today, it returned an error saying “Time Machine Error. The Backup disk image ….sparsebundle is already in use”. As I am the only one using this backup, I hoped that just trying to do the Time Machine backup manually would help… but it didn’t… it returned the same error…

Restarting my Mac didn’t help either…

How can I fix this ?

Answer :

The “sparsebundle already in use”-error occurs if something went wrong during the last backup (which could be because your Mac froze during the Time Machine backup). In that case your Mac did not properly disconnect from the Time Machine backup, so you will have to do so manually.

Fixing this is rather simple :

If you still have ‘the old’ Airport Utility 5.6 on your Mac (more info on this can be found here : https://macmanus.nl/2012/02/02/airport-utility-6-lost-the-option-to-configure-connected-printers/ ), you should do this :

–  open Airport Utility 5.6 (which is in the Utilities folder inside your Applications folder)

– select your Time Machine backup drive on the left (e.g. your Time Capsule)

– click on the “Manual” button

– then select the “Disks” icon

– and click on the “Disconnect All Users…” button

– then exit AirPort Utility 5.6 and run Time Machine normally

– …and do not forget to check in the time Machine Preferences if Time Machine is switched ‘ON’

if you do not have AirPort Utility 5.6 (since your Mac has OSX 10.8 “Mountain Lion” in stalled, which only has the stripped-down AirPort Utility 6 without the “Disconnect All Users”-option), you could either download and install AirPort Utility version 5.6 (directly from Apple : http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1482 ), or you should try this :

– shut down your Time Capsule a.k.a. “pull the power plug” (or other Time Machine backup drive)… and leave it disconnected for about 5 minutes or so

– restart your Mac

– power up your Time Capsule a.k.a. “plug the power cord back in” (or if you have some other sort of Time Machine backup drive, turn it back on)

– go to the Time Machine icon in the Finder’s top menu bar and click “Back Up Now”

– …and do not forget to check in the time Machine Preferences if Time Machine is switched ‘ON’

That’s it !

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tip : using Evernote on an iBook G4 or iMac G5

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Question :

I have Evernote running on my iPhone, my iPad and my MacBook, but I would also like to use it on my old Mac which has a Power-PC (G4/G5) processor.

On the Evernote-website I can only download the latest version of Evernote, which is Intel-Mac only…

How can I use Evernote on my old iMac G5 and iBook G4 ?

 

Answer :

If you are running MacOSX 10.5 “Leopard” on your PPC-Mac (G4/G5), you can use the previous version of Evernote, which can be found here :

http://cl.ly/1I3a0Y3f26282k3p2a0E

If you are still running MacOSX 10.4 “Tiger” (or newer) your only option is to use the online version of Evernote, which can be accessed here :

https://www.evernote.com/Home.action