Thursday, March 24, 2011

Problem with MacBook Pro and Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Drive

I just tried to drop a mac image onto a brand new Seagate Momentus XT hybrid drive using a process that has worked on other drives hundreds of times. This time however I ran into issues. After using the Restore feature and rebooting I got the dreaded blinking folder with a question mark. I tried 2 different MBP's as well as 2 different drives, same issue. Tried scanning and repairing the drive to no avail. Finally I dropped in the original Mac OS X DVD and tried to load it manually. When I did that I ran into a nice little error of "Mac OS X Cannot Start Up From This Disk". No additional information, gee thanks. Doing a bit of googling I ran across an article from Apple saying that this error is caused by a partitioning problem. The drive check reported that it was a-ok but at this point I was willing to give it a shot. So, I went back into the mac tools, deleted all partitions on the Seagate drive and created 1 new partition at 495GB. Then I attempted the restore to that partition I had manually created and it worked. I don't know what it is about these drives but it was the same issue for both and I have never seen that issue on other drives. After that however it seems to be working great.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Unable to Disable Bluetooth Radio

I ran into an interesting issue yesterday where a user needed to disable his bluetooth radio on a bootcamped Apple MacBookPro but the disable option was greyed out in Mac OS X and under the device manager in Windows it was missing. The easy answer is that you cannot disable the radio if you have devices bound to it. Delete any existing device bindings and then you can disable the radio.