Hackintosh disaster recovery part 2

In part one I looked at the steps I took to get my hackintosh working again after accidentally overwriting the boot information. The computer has been working fine for over three weeks since, and I haven’t found any side effects with software or hardware. My latest efforts have been focused on making bootable backups for use in the event of an unbootable hackintosh.

Leopard vs XP vs Vista vs Linux part 1

I’ve wanted to compare different operating systems on the same hardware for several months, to see how much of an impact the OS has. Now that I have been using my hackintosh daily for over a month with no major issues I felt it was time to start doing some comparisons. One of the benefits of using generic hardware to run Mac OS is that it will happily run any other x86 operating system you care to try. The difficult bit seems to be getting them to co-exist without conflicting.

Macs are easy?

Apple products have had a reputation for ease of use for a long time, but I’m starting to think this has gone seriously awry with Leopard. Up to the release of 10.5 I didn’t have a problem operating Macs on a mixed Mac and Windows network. Leopard brought the promise of automatic discovery and display of network shares in the Finder sidebar. I think I mentioned this before, but it worked for half an hour then disappeared. I’ve spent several hours yesterday and today trying to figure out what is going wrong with this, and got to the point where my Macbook and Hackintosh were both visible to each other. The Macbook could connect to the Hackintosh shares, but not the other way round. Add to this the problems I had when upgrading my Macbook to 10.5.2 where the wireless access points became unconnectable and there’s some serious networking issues with Leopard. Does anyone have a fix for this?

WiFi woes with 10.5.2

Until yesterday my Macbook sat next to a 20 inch monitor, keyboard and mouse acting as my main computer. With the success of my new DIY Mac I unplugged all of that with the intention of finally using it around the house as originally intended. This was the first time I tried using a wireless network connection since upgrading to 10.5.2, and to my surprise it no longer works. I currently have two wireless routers in occational use, an old Benq 802.11b AWL500 and a belkin Pre-N F5D8230-4 v2. The Belkin router is now invisible to my Macbook, and although the Benq can be seen and I cannot connect to it unless I disable the wep security. Not an advisable practice. So I no longer have a wireless Macbook.

There’s a huge list of users suffering the same problems in Apple’s support forums, along with the usual fanboys and ‘experts’ denying it’s related to the software update. So lets put it like this. Every other piece of WiFi equipment I have, including an iPod Touch, can still see and connect to both wireless routers. The Macbook cannot. Still not sure? I made a backup of 10.5.1 to an external USB hard drive before upgrading. I just booted from that, and wireless networking is back.

‘Shared’ drives still missing in 10.5.2

One of irritations of Leopard since it was released last year was the shared computers list in the Finder sidebar. Not that it’s an irritating feature since it stopped the requirement of connecting to servers to access them. The irritation is that it doesn’t work. The shared section on my macbook lasted around an hour after I first installed Leopard, and has been AWOL ever since. I’ve scoured the net for any method of restoring this feature with no joy. Other Macs show up if they are using AFP, but anything SMB (that’s windows and my Synology Diskstation) are missing. I’ve disabled Little snitch and the Leopard firewall. Deleted the smb.conf file so a new one was generated. I even followed these instructions to change the DNS lookup order. 10.5.2. was my last hope of seeing this fixed, but after many ‘no known issue’ builds there’s still an issue. Maybe this one is being saved for 10.5.3?

10.5.2 first impressions

341Mb of update later (followed by 48.6Mb of Leopard Graphics Update) and the trusty Macbook is running 10.5.2. Nothing immediately different on startup except one puzzling problem that I will detail later. Here’s the most immediate visible changes.

10.5.2 is finally here

I know it’s only a software update, but this one has enough bug fixes and tweaks to justify a service pack 1 title. 10.5.2 is now available in software update as a substantial 341Mb download. Good job software update supports resuming as I would hate to get 99% of this and have to start again. I’ve stopped all other internet traffic on my network so I can get this asap, but it’s still a relatively slow download. More news on the changes once it’s installed, and don’t forget to back up all your valuable data before updating. I ran Superduper this morning so I have a bootable backup waiting if there are any problems.

10.5.2 due this year

I can understand wanting to get the next Mac OS update right but how long do we have to wait? I’ve delayed starting on my hackintosh until 10.5.2 is out to make sure I buy hardware that will work with the minimum of patching. There are so many reputed fixes in the update that it’s going to be a must for all Leopard users, finally giving us the quality we were originally promised.
Mac news sites and forums were happily predicting 10.5.2 would accompany the Macbook Air, but it wasn’t so. They’ve now moved onto new multi touch Macbook Pro’s due in February and 10.5.2 will launch with them. MacRumors has news that build 9C27 was made available to developers on Thursday, so even if that becomes the final version we won’t see it until late next week.
I’ve got money burning a hole in my pocket Apple. Please get the update out before another gadget tempts me.