Last week I did a clone of my Mac OS X using Carbon Copy Cloner and then repartitioned the hard disk to have Bootcamp partition and then installed the Windows Vista using the complete restore mechanism as I had the complete system backup. Windows Vista Ultimate edition which supports the complete PC backup and restore mechanism built into the Operating System without the need of any third party tools along with incremental full backup (supported in Home Premium, Business and Ultimate editions).
And after the restore, actually I forgot to activate the Windows Vista; as I thought I had 30-days left. But after booted back with Parallels using Bootcamp and later on when I re-booted back to direct Bootcamp the Vista is not fully working and popped to activate with a message An unauthorized change was made to your license and when I try to activate, it always fails with an error Unrecognized error, error code 0×80080250. I tried all possible ways to activate, nothing went in my way. This may be because of my Parallel tools. But funny thing is the same Bootcamp OS works fine when ran through Parallels as it has its own activation.
I left again with another restore last night; and settled not to experiment much with any of the Mac virtual tools until I am done with my work.
Since few days am experimenting with few tools to clone my existing Mac disk to another of my USB backup drive (WD 250GB Passport) so that I can re-partition the existing primary disk to have a room for Bootcamp. This is needed because the OS am running is the image from Yahoo! which has lot of tools thats hard to reinstall back. So having a complete image makes the life much easier.
I found two nice tools which can actually clone the disk and moreover they are free.
- SuperDuper!
- Carbon Copy Cloner
I could not able to install SuperDuper! for some reason as the downloaded .dmg file is not mountable on 10.4.10, contacted the product support team, and a got a message that the downloaded file is corrupt. I did tried this with all other 3 browsers and from 4 different locations, nothing seemed to be working for me.
On the other hand I was able to install Carbon Copy Cloner without any problems and did a complete clone of the existing disk to USB disk using couple of clicks and it just took few hours to complete (~50GB). To test the backup disk how it really works, I rebooted the Macbook with this USB drive and the system seemed to be up and running from USB disk and behaves exactly as the primary hard drive except that it took little longer to boot.
Carbon Copy Cloner does not support the incremental updates when you wanted to re-clone the disk back where as SuperDuper! does seemed to support this through Smart Update.
Now, its time for me to play with the primary hard disk.
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Posted @ 11:18 am ::
Mac ::
Today I thought of uploading some of my photos to Google so that I can keep them a copy in Picasa web interface as my flickr account is going to expire in the next year.
So, first I tried to download and install the Picasa tool on my Windows Vista. The installer just starts and nothing happens. Looks like its not compatible with Windows Vista yet. So, I gave up the tool option, instead tried to do web based uploads using Active X control on IE7 and that control (uploader2.cab) starts the installer and nothing happens as that of the other PC based tool.
Looks like I can’t even use either of the Picasa uploader tools (on PC or web based) to upload photos on Windows Vista. Only option left is to use basic uploader mechanism where in you can upload 5 photos at a time.
Wondering why Google did not even bothered to have a support on Vista. Or is it just related my system ? I tried to install even after a reboot..same problem and on the other hand both the options works fine on Windows XP.
