10.5 Leopard – “Disk error” After Installing Windows Using Boot Camp Assistant

Problem: After running Boot Camp Assistant and doing an initial install of Windows, you get the error message “Press any key to boot from CD. Disk Error. Press any key to restart.” when initially booting into the Windows partition after Windows setup completes. This problem is described in this apple support document: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306504

Solution: You need to actually reformat the Windows partition that Boot Camp created. It will be the parition named “BOOTCAMP”. IMPORTANT: Do not use the option named “Leave the current file system intact (no changes)”. Choose to either format the BOOTCAMP partition as either NTFS or FAT format. If you format the partition in NTFS format, you will not be able to write to the drive while booted into OS X. You will have read-only access to it. However if you choose to format the drive as FAT then you will be able to both read and write to the Windows drive while booted into OS X. The advantage of NTFS is that it gives you finer grain control on file access and there is also a performance improvement.

How to Manually Turn On an ATX Power Supply

There isn’t a traditional power-on switch on ATX computer power supplies so if you need to test one you need to jumper two pins on the power supply cable. You can use a bent paper clip to act as the jumper. Jumper the green and black wires which are pins 13 and 14 on a 20-pin ATX power supply. More details about ATX power supply wiring can be found at this link.

ATX 20 Pin Power Supply Pinout

VMWare Server Black Screen Problem

With the Linux version of VMware Server there is a bug where only the person that created a virtual machine can see its window in the VMware client program. Any other user on the server can log into the VMware server client but they will only see a black screen in the guest machine’s window. The fix is to make the .vmx file for the virtual machine executable to all users that will be viewing it with the VMware server client program:

chmod +x theGuestVMwareMachine.vmx

Wii Destruction

When the Nintendo Wii was first released, there were no wrist straps to prevent the controllers from accidentally flying into T.V. screens when they slipped from the user’s hands. Nintendo has since learned from the thousands of smashed screens to now include wrist straps with their controllers. Here is a video of a kid whose Wii bat goes sailing into the family entertainment center. I hope he at least got a home run out of that 😛