tenpastmidnight blog
Making hay while the sun shines
» Saturday, May 15, 2004 «
iBook problems and connecting OS X to Windows 2000 share
On the way home from Leamington tonight I discovered my iBook has a problem - it wouldn't unlock from it's screensaver, so I had to reboot it by holding down the power button for several seconds. First it wouldn't boot, having some slight distortions on the screen whilst in the boot process, which it never seemed to finish.
Various attempts at booting, it starts fine and runs great for twenty minutes or so, then crashes, the screen giving a distorted image and freezing.
Hmm, put it back in my bag, get home and turn it on, it's OK. Get my PC and router set up and try to find out how to connect them together so I can back up the Mac in case it is going wrong.
This turns out to be easy. Both computers are connected by the same router. I create a new folder on my Windows computer and use Properties -> Sharing to open it up to everyone (which is just me on the network, otherwise that wouldn't be too secure.)
On the Mac I click on the desktop to get Finder to be active, then go to the 'Go' menu, 'Connect to Server', I've found out the IP address of my Windows PC but it finds it after a few seconds searching. I choose the PC to connect to it and get asked for my Windows username and password. OS X then asks me which share I want to connect to and I choose the folder I made. After a moment I have an icon for the folder on my desktop.
I'm copying over as much as possible. The iBook has crashed once since I started doing this but it was out of the room, I think it had finished copying the stuff I'd started before it froze. One annoying thing I keep getting is 'The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -43)' which is very annoying. Apparently it's something to do with Samba which handles the code connecting up to my Windows machine. This doesn't make it less annoying, especially as it stops copying any more files.
This is like the error you get when copying files around in Windows - one error and it stops everything, and you have to look through everything and find out where it stopped so you can restart manually - why not offer to skip the file and keep going? That would be a much nicer error to get, and a list of skipped files at the end of it, along with a more helpful error message.
Hmm, another error, and more copying to do. Hopefully done soon and I can finally get to bed.
Various attempts at booting, it starts fine and runs great for twenty minutes or so, then crashes, the screen giving a distorted image and freezing.
Hmm, put it back in my bag, get home and turn it on, it's OK. Get my PC and router set up and try to find out how to connect them together so I can back up the Mac in case it is going wrong.
This turns out to be easy. Both computers are connected by the same router. I create a new folder on my Windows computer and use Properties -> Sharing to open it up to everyone (which is just me on the network, otherwise that wouldn't be too secure.)
On the Mac I click on the desktop to get Finder to be active, then go to the 'Go' menu, 'Connect to Server', I've found out the IP address of my Windows PC but it finds it after a few seconds searching. I choose the PC to connect to it and get asked for my Windows username and password. OS X then asks me which share I want to connect to and I choose the folder I made. After a moment I have an icon for the folder on my desktop.
I'm copying over as much as possible. The iBook has crashed once since I started doing this but it was out of the room, I think it had finished copying the stuff I'd started before it froze. One annoying thing I keep getting is 'The operation cannot be completed because one or more required items cannot be found. (Error code -43)' which is very annoying. Apparently it's something to do with Samba which handles the code connecting up to my Windows machine. This doesn't make it less annoying, especially as it stops copying any more files.
This is like the error you get when copying files around in Windows - one error and it stops everything, and you have to look through everything and find out where it stopped so you can restart manually - why not offer to skip the file and keep going? That would be a much nicer error to get, and a list of skipped files at the end of it, along with a more helpful error message.
Hmm, another error, and more copying to do. Hopefully done soon and I can finally get to bed.
