Saturday, May 01, 2010
If you've ever used iTunes, and an iPhone, undoubtedly, you've installed apps or downloaded music on your device without syncing it to your computer. Also, you've probably moved to a new computer along the way. That's what I've been doing all week, trying to get my data moved to a new MacBook Pro, and getting it synced with my iPhone. The process is trivial, but with one rather large caveat if you're not paying attention. When you check the box in iTunes to sync your apps, a dialog box opens that asks you if you want to overwrite the apps on your iPhone. Obviously, you don't want to do that, but I know lots of users who, in an attempt to sync their device, click Yes, only to find that their apps are long gone from their iPhone. Not a good feeling.  So what's the fix? It's rather simple, and requires you to know to look for it, I think. Right click in iTunes on your iPhone, and select Transfer Purchases. This selection is prominent in iTunes documentation, but to many users, it's very much non-intuitive, as it isn't part of the syncing process.
So if you're moving to a new machine, when you tether your iPhone or iPod Touch to your computer, trust me when I suggest that you follow this procedure (as well as backing up your device to iTunes) before doing anything else.
Labels: Apple, ITunes, Mac OS X
.: posted by
Dave
11:11 AM
Saturday, August 08, 2009
It's funny how one program's screw up can have unintended consequences, leading to a chain of frustrating events. That happened to me recently as I encountered an issue with Firefox 3.0.10 on my Hackint0sh netbook. It appears that Firefox 3.0.10 has something of a Flash stability issue. The only way I was able to fix it was to disable Flash. which didn't work when I actually wanted to view Flash content. So, I resolved to try something I had not done before - restore from Time Machine, Apple's robust built-in backup solution. My first attempt was to simply call up Time Machine, find the last backup before the Firefox issue, and roll back to that point. Sounds easy, right? Well, it turned out that I had permissions issues in restoring my Library folder. Library contains all of your user settings for every program you have installed. Without that folder's contents, you essentially have to reconfigure and re-register every program you have installed. I proceeded to repair the Mac OS permissions database, which ostensibly should have given me rights to restore my previous Library folder to the OS. However, this didn't work as I had intended. It restored only a subset of settings. I was flummoxed.
So, I decided to try a full restore using the Leopard install disk. Using the USB keys I had created for the original Hackint0sh install, I booted to the install disk and selected the option to restore from Time Machine.  I selected the proper Time Machine image, waited about 35 minutes, rebooted, and...
Doh!  For whatever reason, the Mac wasn't able to find the boot partition. I hadn't counted on this issue coming up. I was able to use the USB bootloader to direct me to the right partition, but not without it.
 After days of frustration, I came across a suggestion in a forum online that I reload the DellEFI bootloader from the GUI. I did so, rebooted, and that fixed the problem.
So, it turns out that Time Machine does play well with the DellEFI for the Mini 9 Hackint0sh. It just required a little research, and some patience. And now, I have a pretty straighforward way of restoring from Time Machine backups in case my Mini has a HD failure, or if I decide to upgrade.
Labels: Hackintosh, Mac OS X
.: posted by
Dave
4:44 PM
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