John Beales

A few weeks ago I had seen nothing but computers and computer books and needed a break from the code floating in my dreams, so I found a book to escape into for a bit. I went to my bookshelf and pulled out the Tess Gerritsen book Bloodstream. An escape into the world of teenage axe murders in small-town Maine. These Tess Gerritsen books are often pretty spooky as far as thrillers go and this one is as well. It’s easy to read, you don’t have to think much, (except a bit to keep the characters in line, something that I usually have to put a bit of effort into, no matter the author or book), and it’s super entertaining, with a bit of freaky science thrown in for fun.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

For Christmas my brother gave me a copy of the game Portal, which required there to be about four gigabytes of available space on my hard drive. There wasn’t. In fact, every time I’ve wanted to copy a large file for the last while I’ve had to re-arrange and purge my hard drive, both in OS X and in my Boot Camp partition. It was time for a new, upgraded, hard drive, and this is how I was able to copy both my OS X partition and Boot Camp, (Windows), partitions to the new drive, and expand both partitions to fill my drive, all without re-installing any software.

The Hardware

First, the hardware. I use a Macbook Pro that dates from the summer of 2007. Until I made this change it had its factory-installed 160 GB, 5400 RPM hard drive. This was an upgrade from the standard 120 GB drive, but three and a half years later it’s no longer big enough for me. I had dedicated 32 GB to my Boot Camp partition, which with a Vista installed was very cramped, perhaps even more cramped than my OS X partition that made up the balance of the drive. I ordered a 500GB, 7200 RPM Western Digital Scorpio Black , (yes, that’s an Amazon Affiliate link), hard drive from Amazon to replace the factory-installed drive. Apparently the WD Scorpio Black uses the same amount of power as a normal 5400 RPM drive, but is faster. I’m not super concerned with power these days as my 3 1/2 year old battery doesn’t exactly hold a charge so I’m always plugged in anyway.

A note on warranties and recalls:

My laptop is in the group affected by the NVIDIA Recall, so even though my 3-year AppleCare is expired, (and it was worth it – a new mainboard and hard drive later), I am still covered for a few months if the video goes kaput. I called Apple to see if I could change my hard drive without voiding that special coverage and they said that yes, so long as there was no physical damage to the computer, I would still be covered if my video died.

My Best Way to Transfer Everything, Step by Step

Required Equipment

• Your Mac, with the old hard drive still installed
• Your new hard drive
• A way to connect your new hard drive to your Mac, probably a SATA to USB connector, or an external hard drive case.

Required Software

• SuperDuper! The free, unregistered, version is fine
• WinClone – The developer seems to have dropped off of the face of the earth, but you can still download the WinClone at Cnet.

The Steps

1. Plug your new hard drive into your Mac, using whatever connector you have.
2. If your Mac isn’t already on, boot from your old hard drive
3. Using Disk Utility format your new hard drive. Select a GUID Partition table, (so you can start your computer from the drive), and, unless you’ve specifically chosen another format, OS X Case-Insensitive, Journaled, as the format. Make the partition as one single partition, (volume), that fills the whole drive. We’ll add in a Boot Camp partition later.
4. Using SuperDuper! copy your OS X partition from your old drive to the new volume you just created on your new hard drive. Use the “Backup – all files” option in SuperDuper!
5. Go clean the garage, or plant the garden. This will take a while. It took about four hours for me to copy about 115 Gigabytes of data
6. When SuperDuper! is finished its business shut off your computer and disconnect everything. You’re about to take your computer apart.
7. Find your computer on iFixit.com and make sure you have the appropriate tools. I only needed two screwdrivers, however one of them was a T6 Torx screwdriver, and the smallest I had was a T8. My father-in-law also had a T8 as his smallest. We ended up using a file to give a hexagonal screwdriver a shape closer to a Torx screwdriver.
8. Follow the instructions on iFixit.com to replace your computer’s old hard drive with the new one that you copied OS X to in steps 4 & 5.
9. Once everything’s connected, but before you’ve put your whole computer back together, I recommend starting up your computer to make sure everything’s connected properly. Be careful not to touch anything inside your computer when it’s running, you could hurt yourself, (or worse, your computer!), if you touch the wrong thing. Once you know the hard drive is properly connected turn off your computer again and remove the power source.
10. Re-assemble your computer.
11. Hook your old hard drive up to your computer the same way you had the new hard drive hooked up before you installed it.
12. Start your computer.
13. If you did everything right you should be running off of your new hard drive now. Check that you are running off of your new hard drive by starting finder and checking the size of your hard drive, or use Disk Utility to check the brand name of your hard drive, or just start without the old drive hooked up and connected it later.
14. Now we’re going to move your Boot Camp partition.
    1. With the computer booted, and the old hard drive connected externally, start Boot Camp Assistant, (it’s in Applications > Utilities).
    2. Follow the wizard to create a BootCamp partition. This partition does not need to be the same size as your old Boot Camp partition. When Boot Camp Assistant asks you to insert a Windows install disk quit Boot Camp Assistant. Your partition is created.
    3. Install and run WinClone. It will probably ask you to install the NTFSProgs Binaries, which it needs to do some reading and writing to NTFS-formatted filesystems, (like Windows partitions), these seem to be safe so go ahead and install them.
    4. With WinClone you’ll first need to make a disk image, (a file that contains the whole contents of your old Boot Camp partition), then restore it to your new Boot Camp partition. So, you’ll need OS X formatted space to store this image. This could be your new hard drive if you’ve just installed a larger drive like I did, or it could be another external drive.
    5. Tell WinClone to make an image of your old Boot Camp partition. It took about 1/2 hour for me to image a 32 Gigabyte partition.
    6. Tell WinClone to “restore” the data in the disk image you just made to your new Boot Camp partition. This could take a while. Grab lunch.
    7. When WinClone is done turn off your Mac and disconnect the old hard drive.
    8. Turn on your Mac holding down the Option key on the keyboard. You should see your Boot Camp partition as a boot option, (it’s probably labeled “Windows”). Select it to boot into Windows.
    9. Windows may want to run a chkdisk. It’s probably best to let it do so. It shouldn’t take crazy long, but will probably take long enough to make a pot of coffee.
    10. After chkdisk runs and you’re booted in Windows check everything is ok.
15. That’s it. Enjoy your new hard drive!

Notes on Backups

The first time I connected my Time Machine drive to my Mac after doing the hard drive replacement Time Machine realized that I had installed a new hard drive and did a full backup. This took a while, (especially because I accidentally pulled the USB cable out of the computer halfway through). If you’re using a Time Capsule it is a good idea to plug your computer in to the Time Capsule with an ethernet cable, not do the full backup over the air.

BackBlaze, (again, that’s an affiliate link), which I use on two computers, didn’t notice the change in disks and continued as normal. I am pretty happy about that because the initial backup with any online service can take a long time and this saved me from uploading over 60 Gigabytes of data over my DSL connection.

Notes on Fragmentation

I took the opportunity to defragment both my Windows and OS X, (I use iDefrag to defragment OS X. In reality there was very little fragmentation on either side, I think that the process of copying everything from the old disk to the new one may have essentially defragmented everything anyway.

Running my Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion

The first time I tried to launch my Boot Camp partition in VMWare Fusion I got an error because the Boot Camp volume had changed. It asked me to remove and re-add the virtual hard drive, which I couldn’t figure out how to do in 5 seconds, so I removed my Boot Camp partition from my Virtual Machine Library. Then to re-add it I had to click “Home” in the VM Library window and choose “Run Windows from your Boot Camp partition” on the right hand side. There’s a setup that’ll run for a few minutes, (it took less than 2 minutes for me), and the Boot Camp partition should be re-added to the VM Library.

Windows Activation

After I had my Boot Camp partition running for a while in VMWare Fusion Windows informed me that it had been deactivated due to a hardware change and I had to reactivate. I don’t know if this was only because of the remove and re-add I did to the Boot Camp virtual machine, or if it was because of the actual hard drive change. Either way Windows had to be reactivated, which is a pain since activation online never works for me anymore and I always have to activate Windows over the phone. However, it’s activated now and seems to work fine.

Conclusion

While it seems like there were a lot of steps, and copying everything around took quite a while, it was much, much easier to copy everything from my old hard drive to a new one. I didn’t have to re-install any software or any operating systems, something that I was afraid I would have to do. It’s something that can be accomplished in about a day, if you have all of the tools and equipment on hand. If you do it on the weekend then you don’t have to feel guilty about the downtime.

If you are familiar with Breaking the Vicious Cycle or the previous edition, Food and the Gut Reaction, you may find it odd that this is the book I read right after reading the 432-page monster Bread, which is all about baking and eating complex carbohydrates, but such is life. I’ve recently had a good reason to learn a lot more about the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, and Breaking the Vicious Cycle is the source of that diet.

The Specific Carbohydrate Diet is a diet intended to help heal the Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis, as well as Celiac Disease, and perhaps autism. The theory is that people affected by these diseases have trouble properly digesting complex carbohydrates, and undigested complex carbohydrates feed intestinal bacteria that shouldn’t be fed, which wreaks havoc in the digestive tract, so, by eliminating all carbohydrates other than simple glucose from the diet those bacteria, (which aren’t really desirable), have nothing to eat and die off and the digestive tract is able to heal itself.

I first heard about the SCD diet years ago and have seen it work for people, but I never fully educated myself about the theory behind it. It was really interesting to finally see why the SCD diet is thought to work instead of semi-blindly following instructions.

If you or someone you know is struggling with IBD or Celiac Disease, I highly recommend looking into the Specific Carbohydrate Diet as a natural way to help manage your disease. It may not help you, but on the other hand it may.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

I’ve been trying to bake more bread over the past several months, and after reading a lot of information on The Fresh Loaf about more advanced bread baking than the sandwich loves in the The Joy of Cooking I got a copy of Jeffrey Hamelman’s Bread: A Baker’s Book of Techniques and Recipes with the intention of improving my bread-baking skills. I’ve read it from cover to cover.

If you’re not already comfortable in the kitchen then Bread is probably not the book for you. It appears to be written for professional bakers. However, I believe that the place to look for the best advice on how to do something right is in literature written for people who do that thing for a living, and Bread is no exception. There’s a ton of great information, from explaining the differences between different kinds of wheat to how to shape different of loaves of bread, to how to weave quite complicated decorative breads out of individual strands of dough. I’ve only baked 3 loaves of bread since I finished the book, (and 2 of them were from the same batch of dough), and already my bread is orders of magnitude better than it was before I read the book.

While the recipes in the book make are naturally somewhat repetitive to read, (I skipped some of details of some of the recipes), the whole first part of the book is full of information and walks us through the steps involved in making bread, and the ingredients that bread is made from, filled with Mr. Hamelman’s personal stories and history. This background information helped me to really understand not only how bread is made, but why it is made the way it is made.

I’m excited to continue experimenting with bread recipes from Bread and with my own creations using what I learned from it.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)

I’ve had a ton of time this week when I’ve had to be away from the desk with nothing to do, and in that time, plus a bit of evening reading, I read the brick known as The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett. What a week!

I had read a book by Ken Follett years ago, but Pillars of the Earth really made him a household name, at least around our household. It’s a big, solid, book that spans fifty years and nine hundred and eighty three pages and in that time I became very attached to the main characters. Mr. Follett paints a picture of a gritty, dirty England during the civil war of the 1100s, (from just before the reign of Stephen I until just after it), where the King had relatively little power and much of England was effectively controlled by the various lords of the country. The book is the story of the struggle between one of these lords, William, a Bishop, and the Prior of Kingsbridge, a fictional town in England. The book is graphic at times – if you don’t like violence then this may not be for you, but that’s not the whole story, it’s just a small part of it and it gives the story a dirty realism that wouldn’t be there without it.

I really enjoyed The Pillars of the Earth and was slightly disappointed when it ended. After nearly a thousand pages and fifty years it’s easy to get attached to characters. I’m excited to read the sequel, A World Without End, but I might take a bit of a break before attacking it – it’s also a brick.

Want to read it yourself? Get it from one of these places and I’ll receive a small kickback:

Amazon.com (USA) Amazon.ca (Canada) Amazon.co.uk (UK)