In this two part video I show how to disable all facets of "resume" in Apple's latest iteration of OSX - Lion. Resume is a novel idea on a cell phone, but I find it rather annoying on my desktop and laptop PCs. Per app resume usually means that I am opening copies of apps in a cluttered state that isn't necessarily productive, and reboot resume means I can't even reboot to get back to a clean workspace. If I want to leave my computer in a state of suspended animation, I can use Sleep - I don't prefer it to automatically treat every scenario like sleep.

In part one of this two part series, I show how to disable per-app resume functionality:

In part two, I demonstrate how to disable full system resume on restart/reboot:

This second method involves updating a system file. It's relatively low risk, but as always - you assume all risk involved with updating settings on any system files. I've been using this for a few weeks now with success - your mileage may vary - don't shoot the messenger :)

So - I decided that i wanted to install Windows 7 ultimate on my beautiful new 27" iMac - partly because Windows runs great on Apple hardware, and partly because I know that somewhere out there, there is an Apple die hard that just choked reading this ;).  If you've read my blog before - you've seen some pretty crazy configurations (My Mac Pro, for example, is a 4 O/S beast that runs beautifully - and I did everything gracefully, and without any of the bullcrap that the so called "Mac Geniuses" say you will run into....  Macs wont run 64-bit this, you have to update EFI tables that....  it's all horseshit (pardon my french).  Macs are pretty much plain vanilla PC's when it comes to their innards - and with a little greasing, things usually install nicely - if you know what you are doing.  Unfortunately, it seems that most people who use Macs - including the majority of the "geniuses" at the apple stores, and the "top posters" on the apple forums, blindly lead people down un-necessarily difficult paths because they simply don't know what they're doing.

Enter my blog....  I've already given you a path to create your own quad booting Mac Pro behemoth.....  and now I'll do the same for the new iMac.  Let's install Windows 7.  I'm not going step by step - I will assume that you have seen boot camp before and I will just cover the issues you will run into because a) I like quick, concise blog posts and b) it should still give you the information you need to be successful.

So, anyways, much to my dismay, I start by using the Boot Camp utility to partition off a 300GB Windows partition, and let it reboot into the Windows Installer.  I go through the W7 intro screens and pick the new installation pathway through the installer.  The first thing I notice is that W7 says that it cannot install on the boot camp partition because it's not formatted NTFS.  No biggie, click the boot camp drive, click advanced, and then click format.  Presto!  the error goes away so I happily click next and start the install process.

The copy process took about 15-20 minutes it seemed - but I was not watching the clock so I might be a little off there, but it didn't seem to take very long.  Before you know it - you will see a message saying that your computer will reboot, or, if you're not paying attention - you'll be blown out of your chair by the apple startup sound which, thanks to an excellent speaker setup in the new 27" iMac, is more annoying than ever (might I suggest you click here if you find the sound annoying too?).  Once the computer restarts, you'll see the installer load back up, finish adding a few more drivers here and there, and copy some more files, and then it will reboot again.

Uh-Oh.... here is where the trouble starts.  When you reboot - you'll see the "Starting Windows" screen with the interesting new microsoft animation, and then your screen goes blank.  What?  What happened?  Do i wait.  Well - you can, but let me tell you - I was doing some other things so I just let the iMac sit - and 45 minutes later, the screen was still blank... so... something is "effed-up".   So - what to do now?

I won't go into details of how i discovered this, because most people just want the solution - so here it is.  Once your computer craps out at the black screen, shut it off by holding down the power button until you hear it click off.  Wait a few seconds, then boot it back up.  You should still have your windows CD in the drive, and when the EFI bootloader launches Windows, you should see a screen that says "press any key to boot from CD/DVD" - do it.  The little wireless keyboard sometimes goes to sleep - so hit enter a few times until you see the plain "Windows is loading files..." message with the ugly ASCII text progress bar.  If you see the "Starting Windows" animation with the windows logo - you missed it.... reboot and try again.

This will basically take you back into the Windows installer.  This time, you're not installing, however - you want to get into Repair mode.  Follow the prompts and click through to Repair mode until you are prompted with a screen that has several options.  One of these options is "Command Prompt", pick that.

This will drop you to a good ol' DOS command prompt - I cannot remember the path it defaults to - but you'll see a line that looks something like "X:\Folder1\Folder2>" where X is the drive letter and Folder1/Folder2 is your current location on that drive.  Without the quotes, type "C:" and press enter.  This will take you to your C: drive - the drive which Windows is installed upon.  Now, type (again, without the quotes) "del c:\windows\system32\drivers\atikmdag.sys" and press enter.  It should say "1 file(s) deleted".  Peachy.  Type "exit" and press enter to exit the command prompt, and then click restart.

Now, your computer will go to the "starting windows" screen, and will advance to another graphic that says your computer is being prepared to be run for the first time - congrats - you've gotten past the black-screen-o-death.  Basically, what is happening is that Windows is detecting ATI graphics hardware in your shiny new 27" iMac, but it's installing an older ATI driver that is not compatible.  Once you get to the part where it tries to initialize the display - it hangs up.  When you delete this driver, you default it back to the standard plain vanilla VGA driver and things will progress smoothly.

Once you get logged in, insert the Mac OSX Install Disk into the DVD drive and wait for it to be recognized.  Click the start button, then my computer.  Double click the D: drive (it will say "WindowsSupport") and allow boot camp to install all of the drivers for your machine.  You will most likely get a couple of times where the install will stop and ask you if you want to allow the software to make changes to your machine - of course, confirm this action.

When Boot Camp is done, your machine will need to be restarted.  Go ahead and restart, and then immediately run Windows Update by clicking it from the start menu.  This will install the CORRECT ATI drivers for your video card, and then your display will be available in it's full glory.

Enjoy!

UPDATE 11/21/2010 - Some time ago, Apple has also created a support article regarding this issue - their solution is slighly simpler - http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3173

A couple of days ago, I posted a review of the Data Robotics Drobo 2.0.  While I loved the featues and ease of use - I was less impressed with it's average USB 2.0 performance, and sub-par FireWire 800 performance (well, in Windows anyway).  I decided to replace it with a LaCie 2TB 4big Quadra and promised that I would post the performance difference I discover.

Well - I'm finished with my initial testing, run on the same exact MacBook Pro 17" 2.66Ghz notebook with Windows Vista 64-bit.  Results are exactly as I expected, see below:

Tests run on a 2.66Ghz Core2Duo MacBook Pro with a 7200RPM 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black HDD, 4GB of RAM, running Windows Vista 64-bit

• RAID 0 Mode - USB 2.0 - 5.5GB Large File Transfer - 28,958,069 Bytes/sec. - Roughly 29MB/sec or around 1656.994 Megabytes per minute.
• RAID 0 Mode - USB 2.0 - 389MB Small File/Folder Transfer - 7,657,999 Bytes/sec - Roughly 7.6MB/sec or around 438.194 Megabytes per minute.
• RAID 5 Mode - USB 2.0 - 5.5GB Large File Transfer - 24,378,867 Bytes/sec. - Roughly 24MB/sec or around 1394.970 Megabytes per minute.
• RAID 5 Mode - USB 2.0 - 389MB Small File/Folder Transfer - 12,191,366 Bytes/sec - Roughly 12MB/sec or around 697.595 Megabytes per minute.

I then shut down the computer, Powered down the Quadra, and hooked it up via the FireWire 800 cable, plugged it into the PC - then rebooted everything.  As with the Drobo, I expected to see better performance.  If not, it would definately prove that Vista FireWire support is lacking.  If it was, it would definately spell problem for Drobo 2.0 v1.3 firmware.

• RAID 0 Mode - FireWire 800 - 5.5GB Large File Transfer - 49,686,687 Bytes/sec - Roughly 50MB/sec or around 2843.095 Megabytes per minute.
• RAID 0 Mode - FireWire 800 - 389MB Small File/Folder Transfer - 2,857,061 Bytes/sec - Roughly 3MB/sec or around 163.482 Megabytes per minute (Verified Twice)

I didnt bother running the FireWire 800 RAID 5 tests as I expected them to be close to what I saw for RAID 0 - Stellar, although for some reason small file transfer speed slowed down quite a bit, the large file transfer absolutely cooked the USB time - telling me that the Drobo (which scored lower results FireWire 800 versus USB 2.0) still has some kinks to work out.

I also ran HDTune tests and received the following results

• USB 2.0 - Read Benchmark Test (RAID 0 Mode)
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 24.1MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 32.0MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 25.0MB/sec
  • Access Time - 16.0ms
  • Burst Rate - 20.4MB/sec
•  FireWire 800 - Read Benchmark Test (RAID 0 Mode) 
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 61.7MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 63.4MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 62.7MB/sec
  • Access Time - 15.5ms
  • Burst Rate - 50.5MB/sec
• USB 2.0 - Read Benchmark Test (RAID 5 Mode)
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 24.7MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 31.2MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 25.8MB/sec
  • Access Time - 19.7ms
  • Burst Rate - 20.7MB/sec

Now - as promised, my plan was to hook this drive up to my server via SATA-II eSATA port and run benchmarks.  WOW - Drobo eat your heart out!

Tests were run on a Dual Xeon 3.0Ghz Server with 16.0GB RAM, Windows 2008 Server 64-bit, and a relatively benign Silicon Image SiI3132 PCI-Express x1 eSATA card:

• RAID 5 Mode - eSATA - 23.5GB Large File Transfer - 150,712,182 Bytes/sec. - Roughly 151MB/sec or around 8623.820 Megabytes per minute.
• RAID 5 Mode - eSATA - 44.8GB Small File/Folder Transfer - 42,014,526 Bytes/sec - Roughly 42MB/sec or around 2404.090 Megabytes per minute.

I also ran HDTune tests and received the following results

• eSATA - Read Benchmark Test (RAID 5 Mode)
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 109.9MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 115.9MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 115.2MB/sec
  • Access Time - 19.1ms
  • Burst Rate - 104.9MB/sec

And keep in mind, that is with a relatively inexpensive eSATA card.  I spoke with LaCie Tech Support (who were fantastic by the way) - and they actually have benchmark results when hooked up to a Mac eSATA that are upwards of 280MB/sec on RAID 0 configurations.  This is truly an external drive that you can run as a main drive or backup.  Excellent product!

As we progress through 2009, we have finally seen the release of a 3.5" desktop SATA 2TB hard disk drive.  Unlike a few years ago - the average home PC now has upwards of 750GB to 1TB of disk space.  Advanced configurations are starting to even include RAID setups in a standard home PC that push beyond 2TB of raw disk space.

With these increasingly large drives and increasingly large home systems comes an increasingly large requirement for reliable backup storage.   To complicate matters further, many home networks like my own have multiple client PCs, sophisticated server machines, virtual machines, domain controllers, network appliances and an increasingly complex selection of devices that need reliable backup space.  

Then... disaster strikes.  On Monday of this week, my Windows 2003R2 server machine decided to crap out on me while I was installing a backup battery on my Intel SRCS28X SATA RAID card.  Fortunately for me, I have always had a couple of 1TB Western Digital external drives hooked to my machine with scheduled Robocopy jobs that sync data off of the RAID array to the externals as a crude form of backup.

In this instance, I was able to restore all of my data from these drives without incident.  I have discovered, however, that I am quickly running out of space for backups.  My home network contains about a terabyte of RAW data on the server and a total capacity of about 6.5TB of drive space across all of the machines in the house.  Granted I don't have the typical home setup, I am fortunate in that I have designed the system such that my Domain Controller uses group policy to map all of the traditional "documents folders" on each of the machines to a network drive.  This means that all of my data is in a central location - on the server, easy to backup and restore but vulnerable to an outage like the one I experienced this week when the server dies.

Enter the Drobo.  For those of you who have not seen one yet - they're a cool little box with four hot-swap SATA drive bays and a pretty intelligent stack of electronics (click here for a look).  The Drobo is basically a RAID unit - but unlike traditional RAID units - it doesn't prompt you with 10 billion different configuration options, hassle you with the configuration complexities of RAID, nor even require you to insert four drives of the same brand, model, or size.  In essence - the folks at Data Robotics have given you a standalone redundant storage system that is intelligent enough to manage itself and simple enough for your mother to use.

The technology behind the drobo is amazing. It seems to waste a little bit more of the traditional drive capacity of say, RAID 5, but the amount of wasted space depends heavily upon how you have it "stocked" with drives.  If you have four 1 terabyte drives, for example, you end up with 2.7TB of disk space where the typical RAID-5 setup would yield 3TB.  The drive itself is very simple - a black box with front access to four quick-release drive bays (you dont even need to put drives in a tray - just slide the bare drives in), a light next to each bay for drive status, an array of blue LEDs on the bottom to show you how "full" the drive is at a glance, and then a power and activity LED.  On the back, you have a gaping hole that acts as the exit for the cooling fan, a power connector, and ports for USB and FireWire 800.

I've wanted one of these little guys since the day they were released.  On Thursday of this week, I happened to look on New Egg and they had a listing which showed a 4X1TB Drobo for $654.99.  Since the base price of a drobo is around $400, another $254 for 4 1TB drives seemed like a deal - so I ordered them, even with next day shipping.  I was determined that this would be a good backup system for the most important files in my network, and with room to expand and the ability to expand at will - I was looking forward to it's arrival.

So it gets here this morning and I open it up.  What do you know, The box contained a bare Drobo unit and a RoboShare device (basically a little box that sits under the DROBO and turns your Formerly DAS device into a NAS device).  What's this?  I say - no drives?  Could my faithful friend Newegg have mislead me on their website with the 4x1TB comment?  Yup.  Turns out that what I ordered was a Drobo/DroboShare bundle.  Funny thing is - the price of this "bundle" was around $60 more than if I had purchased them seperately - $110 more if you consider the current $50 mail in rebate promotion.

With awesome service, as usual, NewEgg agreed to RMA the device - and even offered me return shipping labels.  Me being the techno-geek that I am, however, I decided that I would drop a couple of drives in and benchmark the device to see how well it performs.  For some reason, in nearly all of the review's I've read they comment on the simplicity, the coolness, and the uniqueness of this little "Data Robot" but they never include good performance comparisons.  I mean, after all - if there is ever an opportunity to "try before you buy" - this is it - regardless of whether I end up ordering another one or not I have to return this "bundle".

The results are disappointing.  Don't get me wrong - the device itself is awesome.  The ease of use is fantastic, the ability to continually "grow" your storage by replacing drives one at a time as you need more space is fantastic - something you can't think of doing with normal RAID.  But when you think of using it in the type of configuration I am, you're talking about moving gigabytes and gigabytes of files performing incremental backups on a daily basis - and if something cant move files quickly - it just isn't efficient.

So to test this device - I decided I would do a USB 2.0 test *AND* a FireWire 800 test from my shiny new 17" Macbook Pro under Windows Vista 64-bit.   I read about problems with Firewire on earlier versions of firmware - so I hooked the Drobo up via USB, installed two Western Digital WD2500KS 7200 RPM SATA-II drives, and installed the drobo software.   Upon installing the drobo "Dashboard", which is a utility to show you current information about your little robotic friend, you are prompted to perform a firmware update.  At the time of this writing, that is version 1.3 - I performed the update, partitioned and formatted the drive - and got ready for testing.

Now - one of the weird things about the Drobo is because you can constantly upgrade the drive space by ejecting one drive and replacing it with another, larger drive - waiting for it to rebuild, and then repeating - you end up with a device that can "grow" from it's initial capacity.  Windows would most certainly think this to be odd - so you "thin provision" the device to a certain size - anywhere between 1 and 16 terabytes.   The larger the provision, the longer Drobo takes to start up.  The lower the provisioned size, the more likely you are to end up with multiple logical drives as you expand past your initial provisioned size.  Drobo recommended a 2TB partition, so that's what I went with.

It's a little weird that although this drive only had around 238MB of free space (basically a mirror when you've got 2 drives) - it shows up in Windows as a 2TB drive.  You must use the Drobo Dashboard software or the lights on the front of the device to gauge actual capacity.  No big deal though, it's a small price to pay for the unmatched flexibility this device has to offer.   Since i was already plugged in with USB - I decided to perform my USB tests first.  I decided I would perform two copy operations using RoboCopy, and spit the results to a log file to see the actual bandwidth specifications.

The first file was an ISO that I downloaded from TechNet - a 5.5GB ISO of Exchange Server.   I figured this would be great for seeing sustained transfer rate over a large file copy operation.  The second was going to be a transfer of a folder off of my machine that contained 389 Megabytes of data spread over 1,644 files and 96 folders - an accurate depiction of backing up something like a "Documents Folder".  This would be good for testing the sustained transfer rate over many smaller files and folders.

The Results were suprising actually.....

Tests run on a 2.66Ghz Core2Duo MacBook Pro with a 7200RPM 320GB Western Digital Scorpio Black HDD, 4GB of RAM, running Windows Vista 64-bit

• USB 2.0 - 5.5GB Large File Transfer - 25,228,221 Bytes/sec. - Roughly 25MB/sec or around 1443.570 Megabytes per minute.
• USB 2.0 - 389MB Small File/Folder Transfer - 4,947,238 Bytes/sec - Roughly 4MB/sec or around 283.083 Megabytes per minute.

I then shut down the computer, Powered down the Drobo, and hooked it up via the FireWire 800 cable, plugged it into the PC - then rebooted everything.  I expected to see better performance, especially given the information on Drobo's website - boy was I wrong!

• FireWire 800 - 5.5GB Large File Transfer - 23,397,584 Bytes/sec - Roughly 23MB/sec or around 1338.820 Megabytes per minute.
• FireWire 800 - 389MB Small File/Folder Transfer - 4,209,998 Bytes/sec - Roughly 4MB/sec or around 240.898 Megabytes per minute.

I also ran HDTune tests and received the following results

• USB 2.0 - Read Benchmark Test
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 18.7MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 23.4MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 19.6MB/sec
  • Access Time - 2.0ms
  • Burst Rate - 16.2MB/sec
•  FireWire 800 - Read Benchmark Test
  • Minimum Transfer Rate - 13.3MB/sec
  • Maximum Transfer Rate - 17.3MB/sec
  • Average Transfer Rate - 14.4MB/sec
  • Access Time - 2.1ms
  • Burst Rate - 11.7MB/sec

I can only hope that something with Windows Vista 64-bit wreaks havoc with Firewire 800 speed.  I dont know of any other way to explain such a drop when going from USB 2.0 to FireWire 800.

My conclusion - The drobo is awesome..... IF.   If you like flexibility, if you like ease of use, if you like an attractive physical piece of hardware - then the drobo is your guy.  If you're storing relatively infrequently accessed data or data that will be built up over time (pictures and home movies for example) - this device is perfect for you.  If you're looking to backup gigabytes of data and run backup scripts on a daily basis that incrementally update the data already stored on the drive - look elsewhere.

That's exactly what I did.  I ordered a Lacie 4Big 2TB unit.  Once she gets here (early next week) - I'll perform similar tests and post the results.  The big difference?  Other than FireWire 800 and USB - the Lacie drive also supports eSATA.

When the folks at Data Robotics release a Drobo with an eSATA connector - I'll definately own one of these great devices.  Until then - have fun putting YOUR home movies, pictures, and documents on one.

Being a total PC geek, I have always been anti-mac.   This is to say, of course, until I joined the iPhone bandwagon and started development for the iPhone, which requires Mac Hardware.  Now that Mac hardware is all intel based, however, I find myself still falling back to Windows installs as often as possible.  And now that I have seen how incredibly any operating system runs on my Dual Quad Core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro with dual video cards, 16-gb of RAM, and four 1TB Western Digital Black 1TB hard drives, I am truly enjoying mac hardware .

Traditionally, Apple has provided a Boot Camp installer - which is a great tool when you want to share a single drive to run multiple operating systems.  Boot camp will shrink your OSX partition, create a landing spot for your favorite flavor of windows and then kick off the installer for you.  What you get in the end is a PC with a single drive that contains multiple partitions - one of which will be your "default" OS, and the other which can be selected for restart using the boot camp manager or can be picked on the fly by holding down the OPTION key as the mac starts up.

As I have illustrated in an earlier article, all of this hubbub is totally un-necessary on the Mac Pro.  The Mac Pro is a standard EFI PC, and can boot straight off of the windows installer disk just as well as it can the Mac OS installer disk.  Additionally, the Mac Pro is the only PC (thus far) in the Apple lineup that supports multiple hard drives - four, to be exact.

In this article - I will walk you through creating the ultimate geek set up - modeled after my own Mac Pro, quad booting Mac OSX, Windows XP 64-bit, Windows Vista 64-bit, and Windows 7 64-bit.   I will assume that you already have install disks for each of these operating systems, you have four bare drives - all of which have been installed in the Mac Pro's drive Caddies.  At the present time, do not place the caddies into the Mac Pro - we'll do that one at a time.

1. Install the first bare drive into bay 1 (closest to the front) - we'll use this one for Mac OSX
2. Power the Mac Pro up, eject the DVD drive, and insert the Mac OSX disc 1 into the drive.  If the machine gives you an error because it cannot find a boot device, simply restart again once the CD is inserted.
3. The Mac Pro should boot straight off of the install CD - but I always recommend holding the C key as soon as you power up the machine, which will force a boot from the DVD drive.
4. Install Mac OSX
5. When Mac OSX has completely finished installing, eject the installer DVD and replace it with the Windows XP-64 bit install DVD.  Close the drive tray and power off the machine.
6. Gently pull out the Mac OS Hard Drive located in Bay One just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine.  Fully install your second bare hard drive into the second bay.
7. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Windows XP DVD you placed in the drive in step 5.
8. Follow the instructions to install Windows XP 64-bit on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
9. Once Windows XP has completely finished installing, eject the installer DVD from the drive and replace it with the Vista 64-bit DVD.  If the Vista Installer begins running, exit and then shutdown the machine.
10. Gently pull out the XP64 hard drive located in bay two just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine.  Fully install your third bare hard drive into the third bay.
11. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Vista DVD you placed in the drive in step 9.
12. Follow the instructions to install Windows Vista on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
13. Once Vista has installed successfully, eject the installer DVD from the drive and replace it with the Windows 7 installer DVD.  If the Windows 7 installer begins, exit and then shutdown the machine.
14. Genlty pull out the Vista hard drive located in bay three just far enough so that it is no longer connected to the motherboard - 1/2" should be fine. Fully install your fourth bare hard drive into the fourth bay.
15. Power up the machine and hold down the C key to boot from the Windows 7 DVD you placed in the drive in step 13.
16. Follow the instructions to install Windows 7 on the machine.  The system will restart many times.  If the setup application fails to successfully boot and resume the installation process, restart the machine and hold down the Option key.  Pick the Hard Drive Icon to boot from the hard drive and resume the install.
17. Once Windows 7 has installed correctly, eject the installer DVD from the drive and close the tray.
18. Power down the machine.
19. Push all of the hard drives completely into their bays and close the Mac Pro case.