Problems:

1.  Lion does not support Core Duo
2. Hard drive is unformatted (but already installed!)
3. CD Drive is unreliable / unusable

Materials

1. An extra Mac (yours or a friend’s)
2. A Firewire cable (in my case, 400 to 800)
3. Copy of Snow Leopard CD

Solution

1. Start your Mac in target disk mode. Press power then hold t
2. Ensure connection between Macbook and facilitating Mac computer
3. New hard disk should appear on your desktop
4. Open Disk Utility
5. Find the drive on the left column, ensure you click on the ‘Firewire Target’ icon
6. Go to the Partition Tab
7. Select two partitions
8. Make one Primary, and make the other “OS X Installer” and dedicate 10GB. Click Apply
9. Select the Snow Leopard DVD image “Mac OS X Install DVD”
10. Go to the Restore Tab
11. Source is the DVD, destination is the “OS X Installer” partition you just created
12. Once the disk image has bee duplicated, you should be able to reboot the computer into the installer

Now discontinued and no longer supported by latest OS

Legacy Mode

Since I can not install Lion, the laptop will forever be dependent on compatibility to the 10.6 operating system. This will mean that certain programs will begin dropping support of my operating system. I believe there is still a one to two year life left, as long as the main logic board continues to survive.

Keeping A Copy

Having the install DVD as a partition insures that you will always be able to restore your computer to an earlier version. At this point, the laptop is not my primary device, so I will mostly be using it for travel and compatibility checking.

Going Ubuntu

If the laptop is no longer supported by Apple, then at a certain point it would be feasible to install and use Ubuntu on the machine.

Update 3/11/12

Battery latch has failed. The release knob still turns, however, the battery fails to secure. I have not researched how difficult this is to fix. It has rendered the computer immobile. Age: 5

When watching This Week in Startups, they talked about this problem and thought that I could provide a little extra information on this process. On the show, they say to downgrade premium service you need to submit a question to the contact form to be issued a ticket. If this is not effective for you, see steps 2 and 3.

Here’s how:

1. Attempt to contact LinkedIn through the contact form: https://help.linkedin.com/app/ask
2. Contact linkedin_support@cs.linkedin.com
3. Contact Angie Busch, at abusch@linkedin.com

MySQL vs SQLite3

I first tried MySQL because I am fairly familiar with it and it is pretty ubiquitous, but while MySQL appears simple to install at first, I ran into a few crazy errors:

• ERROR 1133 (42000): Can’t find any matching row in the user table
• django.core.exceptions.ImproperlyConfigured: Error loading MySQLdb module: No module named MySQLdb
• error: command ‘gcc-4.2′ failed with exit status 1

The first was solved by connecting to MySQL as ‘root’@'localhost’ – ok, great.

The second appears that for some reason Python in OS X does not include the module for MySQL. – Uhhh, well, there was this resource to install it.

Finally, I had gcc (a C compiler) installed with XCode, it was version 4.2.1, but my only explanation was it wasn’t working because it was the 64bit version and I have a 32bit Macbook.

Ok, ok ok. That’s 4 hours down the drain.

Let’s try SQLite3: This article was helpful for this part.

1. Open Terminal and see that SQLite3 comes installed
2. $ sqlite3
3. If yes, then (why did we mess with MySQL?)
4. .exit (that’s dot exit to quit back to terminal)
5. cd /your/django/project/ (or near it)
6. $ sqlite3 mydatabase.db; (don’t forget the semi-colon)
7. .databases (to verify creation and path)
8. In your project’s settings.py, use ‘django.db.backends.sqlite3′ and ‘/your/django/project/mydatabase.db’
9. Run python manage.py syncdb
10. Success!

If you found this helpful, please visit a sponsor and get me some of that google money. Also, check out this book for learning Django – I’m using it now and can recommend it: Sams Teach Yourself Django in 24 Hours.

I wrestled with this all day long. Hopefully this post will help people in my position.

Setup: I have a Windows Desktop and a Mac Laptop. There is plenty of space on the desktop so I do not own an external hard drive. I want to backup my laptop wirelessly using Time machine to a remote drive on my XP machine.

What I thought: I would need to have a separate partition formated HFS+ to use Time Machine. Most of the day was spent finding out that HFS+ and NTFS (Window’s File System) can not exist on the same drive. Don’t ask me why.

Why I thought this: Previously, when attempting to backup to a network drive, Time Machine gave me “The Backup Disk Image could not be mounted.” I automatically assumed Time Machine could not write to Windows.

Why I was wrong: Time Machine creates a “.Sparcebundle” and saves files there. Apparently this can be saved on NTFS. The problem I had was creating this Sparce bundle in the first place.

My Solution: Thanks to this site I was able to solve the issue. Here’s what I did.

1. Select the location for the remote backup. I chose the partition I created TimeMachine (T:).
2. If you have not enabled “Unsupported Network Volumes,” follow this tutorial.
3. Mount your network drive and select it in Time Machine.
4. Start Time Machine (Menu button > Backup Now) and watch your remote location.
5. A file is created with the structure ComputerName_MACAddress.tmp.sparcebundle. Copy this file name.
6. On your Mac, open Disk Utility. Click “New Image.” Use the following settings:
7. Save As ComputerName_MACAddress
8. Volume name can be whatever you want.
   ***EDIT: Custom volume size must be the last value set***
9. Change partition to “No Partition Map”
10. Change Image Format to “Sparce Bundle Disk Image”
11. Custom Volume size. Set the maximum you want to use on your remote location. Don’t worry if you don’t have the room on your Mac.
12. Save. Move this file to your remote location.
13. Tell Time Machine to backup again and it should be working.

Good luck! If you found this article helpful, visit my sponsors.

Hopefully the rest of my computer upgrade won’t warrant a blog post!

Long overdue edit (1/30/2010): Thanks to everyone who has commented! It’s so great this article is being found and is helpful. If you’re trying to get this to work, there are some very helpful comments. In particular, Chris points out these three points:

1. The MAC address has to be the ETHERNET adapter’s MAC Address and “not” the Airport’s MAC address.
2. The final file you copy will be in this format: ComputerName_MACAddress.sparcebundle
3. .sparcebundle is added to the file name by the Disk Utility, not you and does not need to be removed.”

Also, my desktop computer has been busted for over a year now. I’ve been running for luck not backing up my macbook and using it as my one and only computer. Sorry I didn’t do my job in keeping up with this post.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Jason

ps: If you found this helpful, please visit a sponsor.

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Jason