I’ve got a new MacBook Pro – one of the Intel i7 ones, 17″, nice piece of kit. I’ve also re-evaluated my external disk requirements on my desktop and bought a dual eSATA/USB RAID0+1 array for storing my Lightroom library.

Sick of running it on USB (and I’m running out of USB ports anyway) I purchased a LaCie SATA II ExpressCard 34 adaptor via Amazon. Today’s been the first chance I’ve had to switch it over as I’m working from home, and installed the drivers as per the instructions. I plugged the card in… instant kernel panic on Snow Leopard. Oops.

No problems, reboot. Except it won’t – not at all. A reboot of the machine hit a kernel panic within a few seconds, not even enough for it to bring up the OS tail. The error is: “thread wants credential but has no BSD process” – a completely unusable system.

I eventually got it down to out-of-date drivers supplied with the CD accompanying the card. The correct drivers are here, and you will not be able to boot your system unless you do the following:

1. Reboot holiding down the shift key, so you enter ‘safe boot mode’. This will take a while to boot so you might want to make a cuppa.
2. Download the drivers from here.
3. Install the drivers and immediately reboot.

I haven’t had any problems since.

(Apparently this is to do with the SIS chipset not addressing 64-bit memory space correctly, but booting into 32-bit compatibility mode doesn’t work either.)

It’s been a month or so since release, there’s a .1 version out and the wounds of being an early adopter have healed somewhat so (gulp) I’ve taken the plunge and installed Snow Leopard on my Macbook Pro 2.33GHz Core II Duo laptop.

Oh alright, I confess I’ve not been brave enough to splat the install – instead I acquired a 500GB laptop drive and I’ve been running it on a USB adaptor. That way I haven’t blasted my 10.5 install, and can run away if need be; in short, I’m playing the safe option given all the reports of incompatibility and weirdness.

So, quick bullet points on verdict:

• Install seemed to go OK, although I mis-remembered my .Me account name/password and it wouldn’t give me an opportunity to skip that bit of the installer. I don’t want a .me account, so please don’t force me to have one Mr Jobs.
• It does seem a little faster (certainly when fiddling with Lightroom).
• Adobe CS3, Lightroom 2, all the usual stuff looks to work just dandy.
• Largely seems to work OK although there’s been an odd incident where my second display didn’t come back after a screensaver (it looked like OS X had put a big black window over the screen, you could just about see the windows behind it in a 2-pixel bleed either side).
• Some oddness with ‘Save As’ dialogs having black blocks and the odd bit of screen corruption too.

So not so bad yet, although I’ve only given it a day of hammer.

What else? I updated Logic Pro 9 and my copy of the B4 plugin has stopped working; also Novation’s V-station thinks it’s unlicensed if you don’t update to version 1.5.1 – this threw me for ten minutes until I googled a solution. I’ve not found a solution to the B4 issue yet. Logic 9 itself seems stable enough and the CPU load is noticeably smaller when playing complex songs (I tested with one which had 97 tracks, lots of audio and software instruments).

I’ve also dumped Parallels after nightmares with their support in the past and turned to VMware Fusion. If all goes according to plan I’ll register the copy come payday.

I gave up on Safari yonks ago on my Mac and I’ve been a bit of a Firefox bitch for years, although I’ve heard good things about the Safari 4 Beta which came out the other day. It’s hardly going to ride roughshod over an installation I already use so I thought I’d give it a go.

Installation nice and smooth, although really why did I need to reboot? Am I running Windows on this thing? No. There is no need. Come on, Apple – stop being daft.

Truthful verdict on the app itself? It’s quite nifty. Blindingly fast on my Macbook, at least in comparison to Firefox; the really very fast Javascript engine will help a lot with my $dayjob work on webapps too. Rendering seems OK but I’ve not tried to do any of the more interesting stuff yet (book hotel rooms, upload content, all that foo).

One big annoyance – the positioning of the tabs right at the top. Thanks to Hitch, this can be sorted on the command line with:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

…which will shift them back below the location bar after an app restart. More undocumented UI fiddles here.

One minor annoyance – because of the preinstalled RSS feeds, it fills your “popular sites” shizzle with CNet, Youtube, Amazon et al. Easily sorted tho.

So far so good – I’ll try it in preference to Firefox for a few days (although probably longer if I can find a way of importing my stored security stuff, bookmarks, and stuff).

I installed a replacement 2.5″ SATA drive in my MacBook yesterday, and connected the old disk via USB to run Apple Migration Assistant and transfer all my stuff over. All went well and in 3 hours I was back up and running.

One big weirdie was with Parallels 3 (this was build 5600) which suddenly couldn’t find any network interfaces and wouldn’t let me put it in Shared Networking Mode. This seems to be because the startup service isn’t “there” any more (AMA didn’t transfer it for some reason), and a reinstall of Parallels over the top didn’t work.

Solution was to deinstall Parallels (use the “Uninstall” script which comes with the download) and then install it again. Worked fine, although it re-IP’d my virtual network interface.

Still, very impressed with the Migration Assistant – it even did the apps I’d forgotten about leaving me with a fully working system in a short space of time.

Edit: Something else that doesn’t transfer properly is the 3G software for the Vodafone 3G dongle. Re-run it and it’ll reinstall the modem and network devices, and set itself up properly.

As documented recently, my Macbook Pro had a bit of an accident with a glass of beer the other week and I’m awaiting a replacement keyboard. The MacBook itself is out of warranty and I can do the switch myself for roughly £50. However, at the same time I thought I’d upgrade the internal drive, so I bought a larger SATA drive to fit.

I had some spare time last weekend so wanted to do the reinstall while life is a little quieter. However, the keyboard hadn’t arrived and I didn’t want to have to pull the MBP apart twice. I thus hit upon the idea of using the SATA drive with an external interface (this one from Maplin).

I connected it up to the MacBook (running 10.5.4) and it detected fine. Partitioned it for system installation and commenced a Leopard install from DVD media. So far so good. Once completed, I installed iWork ’08 and Logic Pro (the latter taking 6 hours to install – it does come on 7 DVDs!). Then came Apple System Update which attempted to install lots of things including the combo 10.5.4 update. Bear in mind the drive is running on USB still.

Reboot time. It sits, spinning its cog and showing the grey apple for, ooh, 3 hours. No response from the disk. Must have done something wrong, so I disconnect and reboot back to the internal disk. I download the 10.5.4 combo update and install manually to the SATA drive (still on USB, still recognising from my MacBook Pro running 10.5.4).

Reboot. Sits spinning again.

I start it into verbose mode (command-V on boot), which shows me that it ‘forgets’ the USB interface a little way into the boot sequence. Bugger. So it seems I have found a bug in 10.5.4 which happens only when booting from an external USB drive (if I plug it in when it’s booted from the internal disk it’s fine, and I can do what I want to the disk!).

There’s images documenting it here. If anyone with a little more Apple boot-fu than I have can offer advice that would be good. I’ve attempted without any other USB devices present and still get the same effect. I’ve not tried the disk internally yet, although it does check out fine under Disk Utility.

Nicky’s 15″ MacBook Pro has been exhibiting some signs of weirdness recently – coloured spinner just sticking on, fans going at full rev. A quick look at Apple Hardware Test (comes on the bundled install DVD) said quite helpfully “error 4SNS/1/40000000:TGOD”. A brief Google search suggested that it’s the logic board that’s gone, so it becomes a warranty repair.

Colin recommended an Apple-accredited repair centre in Armley (Leeds) called Clockwork Creative – a quick phone call and they suggested I bring the machine up. Half an hour later and they’ve got the Mac, suggest it’ll be a few days, and they’ll give me a call depending on parts – it’s a nice small place, seem clued-up and very hands-on.

Now we see how good, and given past support nightmares with other larger companies don’t expect me to remain silent on it

Mm, I took advantage of an offer at 7dayshop.com the other week and upgraded my Mac’s RAM to the maximum it’ll take – 3GB! Nicky got the same and it only cost us £34 (including the postage!) for a 2G 667 RAM clip each.

Makes a hell of a difference (even just upgrading from 2GB to 3GB) – $contract right now involves me throwing around huge amount of data (tables of 30 million rows or more) and merging them – the coloured spinner is coming up less, although now it sounds like a 747 taking off when the fans start up. Mmmm, toasty.

With the prices being that low, you’d be daft to not take advantage of it – especially since Leopard is so memory-hungry.

With the installation of Logic Pro 8, Apple’s ‘Spotlight’ feature is required: without it weird things happen such as files not being found when loading sounds! You end up having to manually go digging for files (which, when they’re 6 levels down is a pain in the arse).

So, I’d not actually realised Spotlight wasn’t working on my install of 10.5.2 – it’s not something I use that much but suddenly it became crucial. I dug around a bit and found that it was crashing like thus:

Apr 12 18:51:28 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Formulating crash report for process Spotlight[147]
Apr 12 18:51:29 trixie com.apple.launchd[139] (com.apple.Spotlight[147]): Exited abnormally: Bus error
Apr 12 18:51:34 trixie ReportCrash[14588]: Saved crashreport to /Users/joel/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/Spotlight_2008-04-12-185121_trixie.crash using uid: 501 gid: 20, euid: 501 egid: 20

Bus error – sounds like a memory issue. Sadly not, it was a little more complex than that!

Next step was to find out how to reindex Spotlight. I found quite a few references on Apple’s support website here which referred to mdutil, but sadly this did odd things too giving me a ‘No index found for volume (-107)’.

Right, the gloves are off. Let’s drop the whole damn spotlight system by:

• Running ‘Fix Permissions’ on the root disk – you never know, something odd might be prodding it.
• Dropping the Spotlight preferences (they might be corrupt) by deleting /Users/joel/Library/Preferences/com.apple.spotlight.plist.
• Killing anything cached by deleting /.Spotlight-V100. This actually gave an error but some stuff disappeared. That’ll do anyway.

At that point I thought ‘hang on – maybe something else is upsetting it?’. Just to be sure, I prevented Spotlight indexing anything to do with Parallels – and therein was the root cause. The damn thing was indexing the virtual disk for Parallels, which would send it into a tailspin. Sodding Windows again, eh?

A reboot later and it’s reindexing, and I’ll try the Logic Pro instruments again. We’ll see how it goes anyway

Update: It’s worked. Bed now.