Friday, July 20, 2007
White Screen Of Death Update - Rain dances in the sun.★
An update on my White Screen Of Death iMac problem.You see I found another user's adaption to the fix by Prodos16, involving an old powermacintosh, and Apple Partition. Great, I thought... I have a PowerMacintosh G3 Beige MiniTower, it has a usb card on it and the firewire drive I have accepts both USB and Firewire drive connections.
I went to turn it on and suddenly realized that I had for some reason deleted the entire HDD on the old powermacintosh some time ago. Don't ask me why, I even formatted the drive to FAT32 as well. It was evidently one of those moments where curiosity gets the better of reason in what amounts to be a neural fist-fight.
So I popped in my craftily cared for OS 9 cd, but now the PowerMacintosh won't boot from that either. It's almost as if all the macs in my house decided to do a group suicide. Pop a few pills and fry their logic boards.
I'm on the phone to Apple support right now, they've been super helpful. We ran through a couple of the standard troubleshooting procedures but basically come to the conclusion that the machine is bust. That's right, on suicide pills.
Normally I'd be throwing in the towel and complaining bitterly, but once again Apple have gone far further than the extra mile. They arranged for me to visit an Apple Center to get the machine serviced. Once they realized that the nearest Apple Center to me was about 60 miles away, they decided that asking me to drive that far was simply too much. (Hell, I was just happy to hear that my machine would be looked at in the first place!)
So they put me on hold for a second or two, then came back with some great news. They're sending a serviceman to my house, to my room, to my iMac, to fix it. They brought the service center to me, rather than ask me to go to it.
Sure, if you lived 10 miles away from a Apple Center taking your goods there yourself is completely acceptable. I just didn't expect this level of service and courtesy.
I'm expecting a call any minute now on my mobile, and a visit within the next 24 hours. If the technichan can't fix the iMac on site, he's going to take it away, get it fixed / replaced and bring it back.
Kudos to Apple yet again, this is the level of service that keeps us all coming back.
Happy Mac'ing!
Labels: white screen of death
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Friday, July 20, 2007 8:41 AM
Thursday, July 19, 2007
White Screen Of Death.★
Well, really its grey.I was trying to install XP, Bootcamp took me to the final bit where you click Install, iMac restarted and I got as far as the choose partition screen of the windows installer.
Noticing that the windows installer had mis-read my partition table as being 130GB rather than the 20GB I had set aside for windows and the 230GB for OSX, I quit the installer using the F3 command it specifies.
Upon restarting, I just got a blank white screen. I restarted again and got a black screen looking rather like DOS asking for some bootable media. After another restart ejecting the XP disk I only get the white screen.
I've tried resetting PRAM, holding option only shows a cursor and a white screen.
You can move the cursor, which is a bonus.
I found a fix here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4225625�
But I need another working mac for this (or do I? c'mon you brainy lot!).
So I'm stuck here on this wonderful grey windoze box. Right now it has a distinct advantage over my mac, in that it actually works.
What does good old John Public think?
Labels: white screen of death
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, Thursday, July 19, 2007 10:23 PM
New user musings. iChat fixes and foibles.★
My sister just got the exact same iMac as me. Well actually my brother in law did, because my sister had absolutely no clue how to use it. (She's got pretty good now).When they got it I sent them a quick email explaining the process of installing skype. We got that up and running and had a video call going in literally seconds. It was simple and intuitive. Drag a few files, click a few buttons, add a contact, click call and we were set. After about five minutes my nephew Jalen was literally a skype pro and was quickly becoming proficient with the entire OS.
Then I had the bright idea of introducing them to iChat. Actually opening iChat was smooth enough, the catch came later when I realized that my sister had neither an AIM account or .mac account.
Uh oh.
She lives in Australia so I figured I'd just send them the link to sign up for a free AIM screen name using their existing email address. They just got error message after error message. "We cannot offer this service to you at this time", etc, etc.
So I made them account, set their location to the US, put in my favorite NY postcode and it was all smooth sailing until they had to confirm their email account, which involved copying and pasting and ultimately me doing it for them.
After finally successfully logging in with the account (if you used another email address as your screen name, you have to use that email address to log in with, not your chosen screen name. Lesson learnt.), they added me and we were all go... except that I couldn't see them on my buddy list. Hell the call came through, and I accepted it but no buddy list update.
To cut a long and tiring episode short, I had to delete all address information about my sister from the mac. Re-add her, unblock her and do a fully fledged rain dance before anything worked.
But I figured out the secret. The real problem. It's called NAT, and no it's not short for Nathanael. Network address translation, I'm behind a few layers of routers and crazy firewall stuff. I also wear a tinfoil hat. So the problem was my end, apparently.
I normally have my mac os x firewall turned off, and rely on the multitude of grey boxes around me to protect me from evil goblins. I had to turn the firewall ON, and type in a bunch of ports supplied oh-so-kindly by the iChat help application, then add them as a rule.
After I figured that out we were playing chess and reversi, swapping files and living the Mac digital lifestyle like never before.
User friendly solution? Nope.
Frustrating for new users? Unbelievably.
Frustrating for old hands? Even more so, we're used to most things just working. This plain didn't.
Is Skippy impressed? No. Skippy has fallen down a well and now needs another cartoon animal to save him, or a really big pogo stick.
So here are the ports for anyone else who has run into trouble:
TCP: 5190,5220,5222,5223,5298
UDP: 5060,5190,5279,5298,5353,5678, 16384-16403
If you need more steps, open iChat, then click Help>iChat Help. Search for NAT.
Have no idea why it didn't just work with my firewall off. Seems odd that I had to actually turn it on.
Also, the other trouble I ran into was that iChat had automatically blocked my sister. I didn't realize till I selected her screen name in the buddies list, clicked Buddies and saw the tick next to Block Buddy. Clicking on it resolved half the problem.
I expect nothing less than a revamp of this area of iChat for leopard. Users should be able to create an AIM screen name from within iChat rather than having to even go near a browser. NAT settings should be added automatically when a user requests it.
Also, when I open Chess, I see an option to invite myself to play a game with myself.
What?
Other news... iBackup has released an update (not sure on the freshness of my coverage on this), I'd definitely recommend getting it. iBackup is a wonderful program that does Backup's job a few times over, and for free. Check it out at http://www.ibackup.com.
Till next time, I wish you Happier Mac'ing!
★ 0 Comments. | By Skippy, 4:56 PM
