Macintosh

Discusses all things Macintosh.

Contact: Richard Corzo. Meets the first Thursday of each month, 7:00 p.m. at the DACS Resource Center.

News and Notes

In April, we started the meeting with Bill Manyin demonstrating SMART Utility (http://www.volitans-software.com/Home.html). This shareware utility gathers statistics supplied by your hard drives as an early warning system for possible impending failures.

In the meantime I downloaded an iMovie project that I intended to work with. As I opened iMovie HD, the application hung. It seemed to affect the whole system. Along with Leopard I also have Tiger and Mac OS 9 installed on the PowerMac G4. To help answer one member's Mac OS 9 question I restarted the system and held down the option key to give me a list of the bootable drives. I selected Mac OS 9 and after I reached the desktop I got an error message related to the video driver, which also locked up that system. The only system still working at this point was my Tiger partition. I booted into there, but was unable to see either my Mac OS 9 or Leopard drives!

We adjourned the meeting and the next night I started up the PowerMac again into Tiger. Again the Leopard and Mac OS 9 drives were missing, but this time I waited a while. Apparently Tiger had taken the other drives offline while it attempted repairs, because those drives finally appeared on the desktop. I ran Disk Utility and then DiskWarrior for good measure, and was then able to boot into the other Mac partitions. In Mac OS 9 I got the same error message upon reaching the desktop, but I answered the other way. (I believe the dialog was one of those with an OK and Cancel.) This time I was able to use the system without hanging and then chose the Leopard startup disk from Control Panel. Booting into Leopard I found everything back to normal and so we should be in good shape for the next meeting.