Broken MBR and Partition Map

Ooh, scary stuff this afternoon. I was preparing to back up my OS x86 installation, and make a bootable version on another partition, but at some stage I must have repartitioned the whole hard drive. Which included the 75GB NTFS partition with Windows XP, and a heap of data on it. I originally had thought it was the NTFS-3G (read/write FileSystem driver for Mac), but, alas, it wasn’t. So, I spent the next few hours downloading repairers, trying in vain to undelete, before I happened across one CD ISO that did the trick – restored the partition information from a backup. I then had to repair the windows installation (fix the MBR and something else, FIXMBR and FIXBOOT), and everything is back to normal. Man, I’m feeling a whole lot happier than I did a couple of hours ago…

Fixing Broken Samba Sharing

Well, I had installed OS X on an unsupported machine, and had virtually everything I wanted working. With two exceptions. Finder wasn’t able to connect to any file sharing servers, but I was able to manually create mounts, using: $ mount_smbfs //user:pass@machine/mount /mnt I was also able to do something similar with AFS shares. Which, by the by, are much nicer – they actually allow me to copy icons from my iMac to my Dell. Then, I happened across this forum post: Personal File Sharing & Samba, JaS 10.4.7 Basically, it seems that some of the files from the Hackintosh installation aren’t perfect. So, the following needs to be done:

1     $ cd /usr/sbin
2     $ sudo rm AppleFileServer
3     $ sudo ln -s /System/Library/CoreServices/AppleFileServer.app/Contents/MacOS/AppleFileServer AppleFileServer
4     $ sudo unlink /System/Library/Filesystems/afpfs.fs

I’m not sure about the last one, but I did it anyway. And then I was able to use the Finder “Connect to Server…” tool. And have shortcuts on my desktop to servers.