I expected that this day would come eventually, but like all software crashes, it still hurt when it did 
. Today, my pride and joy hackintosh has finally thrown in the towel.
It was never a perfect install, but I had gotten used to all of the hangs, crashes, bangs and rattles that it had and they would warm my heart like no native MacOS ever could.
But today, the dreaded day came. I booted up the box this morning to a POST error (I can’t remember what exactly). I thought this was a little strange as the box has always posted despite being overclocked to 3GHz from 2.6GHz. I had turned off the power supply last night as the fans had kept spinning despite shutting down (one of the mac install’s lovable traits). I didn’t think that this was going to be a big deal so I rebooted, got it to post and it started to load MacOS. This is where the problems started.
It hung on boot up, so I rebooted again. This time it got to login prompt but would go no further so I rebooted yet again. This time I tried a verbose boot and it flagged up an error about corrupt HDD (something about keys, I can’t remember exactly). Then came safe mode and it hung again. I repeated this for a few hours trying to boot from my install CD and run Disk Utility. My final try came when I burned Disk Warrior to DVD, only to realise 3 DVDs later that it wasn’t going to boot on PC hardware. I finally (about an hour ago) conceded that there was going to be no way I could recapure the old install so I have began to backup data.
I am using TransMac to copy all of my needed files from the Mac partition onto a FAT32 drive and it is working rather well. I will then be installing a fresh copy of MacOS again and praying that I didn’t leave anything obvious behind. I will be doing a little bit of research before I install as I wasn’t overly happy about the shutdown/restart/sleep not working so I may try a different install CD to iAtkos. Most likely not though as I cba downloading any more ISOs.. I wasted enough DVDs today.
I’ll make some notes during the install and write a little guide up here when I’m done
Stephen
From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/8035511.stm
The boss of a speed camera firm has been banned from driving for six months after admitting speeding at more than 100mph on a 70mph road in Suffolk.
Tom Riall expressed “deep regret” over the incident
Tom Riall, 49, is a chief executive of Serco, which has provided more than 5,000 speed cameras in the UK.
He appeared at Sudbury Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to driving at 102.9mph on the A14 on 4 January, 2009.
Riall was fined £300, banned from driving for six months and had six points added to his licence.
Riall, from Ufton Nervet, near Reading, was caught speeding in his blue Volvo by a police patrol car on the eastbound dual carriageway just before 1300 BST, the court heard.
Outside court, he said: “I accept the decision of the court. I recognise that speeding is not acceptable.
“I very much regret what happened and I have made a full apology to the court.”
On Serco’s website it states the company prides itself on providing “robust evidence” of drivers’ speeding.
Craig from youreadmyblog.info let me know a few days ago about a project him and a few of his friends from uni have started called ScreenStamp!
He is looking to get some feedback as far as I know and I think that the software is pretty useful so I will give it a mention here.
Here is the description from Craig himself:
What is ScreenStamp! going to do?When ScreenStamp! has been fully developed for the release of the BETA version, it will once run ask you for a location to save your screen shots to, along with a name that the program will number, allowing the user to concentrate on the job at hand as a pose to saving screen shots.ScreenStamp! will also time and date stamp the screen shot at the top right hand corner.
Where did the ScreenStamp! idea come from?
When myself and my work group at University, where we are studying Ethical Hacking for Computer Security were carrying out an Information Gathering exercise the task of taking and saving screen shots with the clock opened and date showing was becoming really boring, so myself and a couple of other group members decided that and application that would do this for us would be well worth the time spent on creating one, after we had looked at failed to fins an application that did exactly what we had in mind.
I urge you all to go try it out and let us know what you think and of any bugs you find, it is available for both windows and linux with the possibility of Mac version coming soon (although the linux version may work on Mac??)
You can find out more and download @ http://www.screenstamp.co.uk
I’ve re-uploaded my mass pagerank checker after losing it when I installed WordPress.
Sorry to anyone who was looking for the tool within the last week or two but it’s back now and fully functioning
Regards
Stephen
Hey,
This week I’ve moved back from my ultimate dedi to a Futurehosting VPS in an effort to cut costs and turn a larger profit from Drag Racer. I tried to make the transfer of data as quick as possible and seeing as how my database is a few hundred MB I transferred it using mysqldump.
First thing’s first, you need to prepare the receiving server. Create a user for the sending server to connect as using this command from the mysql console:
GRANT ALL PRIVILAGES ON *.* TO ‘username’ @ ‘ [OLD SERVER IP] ‘ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
This will allow your mysql server with the IP [OLD SERVER IP] (replace this with it’s real ip ofcourse) to connect using the username ‘username’ and password ‘password’.
Next we are going to use mysqldump in the linux shell (or windows cmd prompt, I’m not 100% where it’s located in windows) to dump our databases to our new server. The syntax of the command is as follows:
# mysqldump -u username -p -h [NEW SERVER IP] [DATABASE NAME(S)]
The command to dump two databases (one called database1, the other database2) to ip 192.168.1.1 is as follows.
# mysqldump -u username -p -h 192.168.l.1 database1 database2
mysqldump will now take a few minutes (depending on the size of the database in question) to dump the entire contents of database1 and database2 onto your new server (in this example 192.168.1.1). I recommend that once you are finished with this, you remove the user we created to copy the database over. To do this we use this command from the mysql console:
drop user username;
If you have any questions please leave them below in the comments. I also recommend using the following website to look up the commands I showed and their uses:
mysql.org
I know I’m about 6 years behind with this, but when I stumbled across it on another one of my frequent 2am internet journeys I was quite amused.
From http://www.tweakxp.com/article37502.aspx
Windows-XP has a “feature” (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the “Scroll Lock” key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:
1. Start regedit. (If you are unfamiliar with regedit, please refer to this FAQ)
2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt\Parameters
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll
4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify
5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK.
6. Close regedit and reboot your system.
7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing “Scroll Lock” twice.
Note:
Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:
1. Go to Control Panel > System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button.
4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.
Happy crashing…
Now, the first thing I wondered was WHY. What possible reason could the devs have for this weird little keystroke. And then I set out to test it. I then realised that I was booted into MacOS. I wasn’t going to reboot into that ungodly OS just to purposely crash it (it usually would anyway) so I’ve just put it up here, incase anyone is bored enough to try it on their (or a friend’s 
pc)
Stephen
Yeh, I lost all of you guys’ comments.
I’m not going to be reposting these (SORRY!) so if there are any that you feel should be reblogged (I can think of a few, code exerts) please post here and I’ll dig them out
Stephen
After a whole month of not blogging I have decided to finally go with the rest of the world and switch to wordpress.
I must say, I like it!
First impressions (It’s been installed about a minute)
- The interface is pretty self-explanitory, if not a little slow actually;
- Installation was a breeze (so simple, you honestly know nothing like it)
- It’s cosy
- The Import tool features a brilliantly useful RSS imported which I used to import all of my posts from my old blog in, 30 seconds?!
All in all it’s a much better environment to blog in than the crap old system that I coded (for fun mostly) and I think it will promote me to blog alot more freely and easily now.
In the coming days, look out for a new theme, some plugins, and some of the old blogs to be re-prettified with pictures which are now in a metaphorical dusty hole with my old blog software.
Stephen
Hey,
Just a few quick updates on my [url=http://iatkos.wikidot.com/]iATKOS[/url] install.
It is fully updated to MacOS 10.5.6 (latest version)
After many hours of searching the internet I have found all of the drivers I need (M audio Delta, Nvidia 8800, Onboard LAN, etc etc)
I have installed Logic Studio 8 and it is fully functioning (minus the samples and stuff which I can get hold of quite easily)
And for the non-beleivers, here’s a screenshot:
[url=http://www.groomi.net/files/hackintosh.tiff][img]http://www.groomi.net/files/hackintosh.tiff[/img][/url]
So yeah, it turns out that I am now going to be using Mac as my primary OS and windows will just sit at the start of my harddisk gathering dust incase I ever want to go and play GTA iV, or something else comes along that I cannot do inside Mr Mac.
Oh, if anyone knows how to make Logic 6.4.3 files work in Logic 8, please drop me a comment.
Cheers
Stephen
This blog comes to you from within safari, but not a windows port.. This is the real deal!
Today I managed to successfully get my PC hardware to run MacOS and as far as I can see, everything is working dandy. It boots fine, I’ve just managed to get my ethernet drivers in and after much MUCH difficulty earlier today my 8800GTX is functioning properly.
I am still unconvinced as to which will become my primary OS but for now, the geek in me is happy to dual-boot and my idea of installing UbuntuStudio has died.
I will be installing Logic8 and a few other goodies later but for now I’ll just enjoy that I have done something against the grain today and it’s actually worked!
If anyone has had any problems running MacOS on PC hardware or would like a guide on how I did it, please don’t be shy to post in the comments!
Stephen
Software | Stephen Groom | 
May 10, 2009 5:32 pm | 
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