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One of the exciting things about getting a new Mac was that it was an Intel machine. I’d managed to get a copy of the image that goes onto all our work machines off a colleague in Melbourne, and I was excited to put that on a partition of my Mac so I could do away with my pathetically slow Toshiba laptop that isn’t due to be replaced for another 15 months.

I got the file (a DMG image), and looked through the contents. There was an instruction guide, which gave heaps of instructions, but basically only said that the CD (of which I just had the image of) is bootable and you just need to start the computer with it in the drive. That was all fine, I thought, I just need to get this main computer image file (a Nortons’ Ghost image), put it on a CD, and make that CD boot into DOS with Ghost to do it all.

[The next couple of paragraphs are pretty nerdy.]

I thought that would be easy. Turns out it isn’t. The Mac’s CD drive isn’t compatible with the standard DOS Oak CD driver. Even drivers I found that were supposed to work wouldn’t. So I moved onto USB and trying to put some USB ASPI drivers into the config.sys file, but they wouldn’t work either. (And by this time, most of the week had passed.) Last night, I tried a couple more USB drivers, but still no luck. And I was getting to the point where I thought I’d give up.

And then my colleague sent me a Twitter message, basically implying that the DMG file that he’d sent me originally was already bootable and that I didn’t need to do anything. That was a pretty important bit of information that I’d completely missed when he first gave it to me, and I hadn’t even thought to check.

ARGH!

And so, after checking this morning, sure enough, all I needed to do was to burn that DMG file to a CD and boot. And it would work! And I could’ve done that last weekend!

So I’ll be doing that on Monday… cos once it boots, it needs to be connected to our LAN to register itself to the Active Directory server and pull down all the programs I need.

It was a bit of a waste of a week… but it was still a heck of a lot of fun playing around in DOS and remembering how config.sys and autoexec.bat files work. Made me fondly remember the days of Westfields Sports High. :)

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 31st, 2009 at 2:15 pm and is filed under nerd central, working for a telecommunications company . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.