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Daniel's Notepad

Welcome to my notepad.

Educause 2006 Midwest Regional Conference

From Monday, March 13, 2006 through Wednesday, March 15, 2006 I will be at the Educause Midwest Regional Conference. I'll post notes from the sessions I attend here. I'm trying to keep it all updated in realtime, so IM me if you have a question for a session I'm currently updating, or will be attending later on in the day. My AIM screen name is danieleshown.

Zen Base Image on Mactels

I finally got it working (and in a fully automatable way.) It took a bit of effort to get it working. Here's the final process:

  1. Prepare the Intel Mac
    1. Download and install Bootcamp from apple.com
    2. Run Bootcamp to repartition the drive and create a drivers CD.
    3. Download and install NetRestore (includes NetRestore Helper) from bombich.com
    4. Download and install the ntfsprogs tools by linuxntfs.org (binaries provided by bombich.com)
  2. Prepare the add-on image:
    1. Extract the driver files from the CD that Bootcamp creates.
    2. Create an add-on image, or add the drivers to an existing add-on image using the Zen Image Explorer.
  3. Prepare the Windows Disk Image
    1. Install the Zen base and add-on images on a PC using the Zenworks Imaging tools.
    2. Remove the drive before rebooting (and running sysprep,) and place it into an external drive enclosure.
    3. Attach the now external drive with the zen base image to the Mactel.
    4. Boot the Mactel from a Windows installation CD, and go to the Recovery Console
      1. Run bootcfg to fix the boot.ini file using the instructions provided here: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/pcrepair/a/missinghal_dll.htm
      2. Run chkdsk c: /p so that you can resize the NTFS partition of the internal drive.
    5. Reboot into OS X, and open a Terminal window.
    6. Resize the partition size of the attached drive to its minimum size (approximately 3.7G in my experience) using these commands
      • diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1 unmount the drive
      • sudo /usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -i /dev/disk2s1 determine the minimum size of the drive
      • sudo /usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -s nnnnM -n /dev/disk2s1 do a test run with the minimum size in megabytes
      • sudo /usr/local/sbin/ntfsresize -s nnnnM /dev/disk2s1 resize with the minimum size in megabytes
      • diskutil mount /dev/disk2s1 remount the drive
    7. Create an NTFS master disk image using NetRestore Helper from bombich.com
  4. Restore the Zen disk image to the Bootcamp partition
    1. Using NetRestore, restore the Zen disk image to the Bootcamp partition (I did a local restore by dragging the file onto the source text box in the NetRestore window and selecting the Bootcamp volume in the target dropdown menu.)
    2. At this point you can reboot into Windows, and it will load your Zenned Windows installation.

Interesting places on the web

  • Hardcore Mac OS X users may wonder "Why would I ever want to run Linux on a Mac? It has a *nix foundation and X11. Everything from the world of Linux is easily adapted." Well, as Jasjeet Sekhon indicates, "don't assume that [Mac OS X] is just like Linux or some other efficient unix but with a friendly gui. Life is full of tradeoffs and reasonable people can decide to make different choices." Here's one tradeoff worth noticing: http://sekhon.berkeley.edu/macosx/intel.html
  • Just found this interesting technote on the plist required to not create .DS_Store files on network connections: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301711

Useful places on the web

  • "Doing things over and over is over. Mac OS X version 10.4 "Tiger" introduces Automator, a new application that automates anything on your computer quickly and easily. Using the power of Mac OS X, Automator controls your applications and files, automating-in an instant-what you need done with them. Automator will change the way you use your personal computer." OK, so, honestly, automating repetitive actions on a computer is nothing new, but Automator really does make it much easier than it has ever been: http://automator.us

Odd GUID Partition behavior

I recently tried to re-image the Mac Mini that I use for packaging and testing things. I used the standard NetRestore procedure I've used umpteen times before. I had just done it about a month prior when I got it back after loaning it to Chris Koerner for a project he was working on. It imaged, verified, and then rebooted to a complete kernel panic, indicating it couldn't find the ACPI Driver. Odd. I thought maybe the NetRestore session went bad, and the verify stage didn't catch it. I rebooted to CD and prepared to reinstall the OS. It wouldn't install, indicating that the OS couldn't be installed on that disk, and that it wasn't bootable. Odd. More clues came when I launched Disk Utility and tried to reformat the disk. A regular reformat under the "erase" tab did not help. The stats on the disk indicated that the Macintosh OS volume was at partition 10. PARTITION 10??? Re-partitioning the drive allowed me to reinstall, but another odd thing was the partition scheme was Apple Partition Map, the legacy format used by PPC Macs, a format that will not boot on a Mactel, so I had to switch the partition scheme to GUID. It's an oddity that I'm going to have to dig into further down the road. I don't know if it is related to the multiple re-imaging and the dual boot tests it was used for, or if there was something wonky in the NetBootInstall set I was using. I have to recreate the NBI today for an unrelated reason (new model machine in our pool) but it's something I'll need to keep an eye on in the future.

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