Monday, June 13, 2011

A useful tip for Mac OS X users

Reinstalling or restoring the operating system to a previous state in Mac OS X is definitely something you don't need to perform often, however it seems that the time has finally arrived. As I have a few machines in different locations, I wondered how I could create a backup copy of the original Snow Leopard installation disk in order to keep my original disk in a safe place.
Copying DVDs can be a tricky matter, but thanks to a great tip I found on Walter's blog, I could clone my original disk without any hassle (well, almost, the original Apple's Optiarc drive refused to write to the disk, but my secondary Pioneer drive did the job smoothly).

By the way, if you are experiencing problems with the WiFi connection in your Mac and the Mac is running on top of Snow Leopard 10.6.7, chances are you hit a mysterious bug that seems to affect Macs with this patch level and certain wifi access points. Since I upgraded to 10.6.7 my wifi network has become sluggish if not completely unresponsive.
So now, in order to demonstrate the theory, I need to revert at least one machine to 10.6.6 and see if that does the trick as some users claim, hence the need of using the original installation disk.

Regardless of the final result, the dvd cloning tip is something a mac user definitely needs to know.

6 comments:

Mikael said...

Why not drag the content of the DVD to a USB drive? I have one in my bag (16GB) with 2 partitions, Mac formatted, the install DVD and another bootable Mac OS X system with all system recovery utilities. Things like Drive Genius, Data Recovery tools etc.

Byte64 said...

It looks like an excellent idea IF you have got a spare 16GB USB drive...

Thanks
Flavio

Mikael said...

They have spare ones online starting at $15 when I just checked;-)

Raymond said...

The problem is not only with wifi it is as well with USB 3G dongles.
Had lot of issues with VPN connections and downgraded to 10.6.6

Raymond said...

10.6.7 also gives problems with VPN connections and mobile 3G USB internet. I have a Sierra USB308 (Telstra Australia 3G Network) and Internet would work, but could not get a VPN connection to work properly. I could establish the VPN fine, but could not ssh into our servers. So downgraded to 10.6.6 and everything works again.

Byte64 said...

Hi Raymond,
on one hand is reassuring to know that a lot of other people are going through the same ordeal, but on the other hand it seems so ridiculous that Apple didn't acknowledge yet that there is as a real problem out there.
I could not spot any official workaround anywhere, it's just a trial and error process where one applies what other users suggest and not infrequently users disagree on what's best to fix it.
However, going back to 10.6.6 seems the best thing to do according to the vast majority.

Thank you
Flavio

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