Pierow’s Prattle

• Fully Use Your Apple Keyboard in Windows with Apple Wireless Keyboard Helper [Windows Downloads]

Now that you can no longer purchase Snow Leopard from Apple, it might be a good idea to make a backup of your install media.  Here’s how to do that in eight easy steps:

1. Insert your Snow Leopard DVD.
2. Open /Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility.app.
3. In the left side of the window, select the “Mac OS X Install DVD”.
4. Click “New Image” from the Disk Utility toolbar and select where you want to save the temporary image. For “Image Format”, choose “DVD/CD master” and for “Encryption”, choose “none”.
5. The image extension in the “Save As” box will be .cdr (this is what you want) — click “Save”.
6. Once the temporary image is created, it will show up on the left side of the Disk Utility window. Select it.
7. Insert a blank dual-layer DVD
8. Click “Burn” from the Disk Utility toolbar.

Critter from Critter’s Code posted a blog entry that could come in handy for archive files downloaded from the internet.

Essentially, when you have multiple archive files in a given folder, clicking on each one will expand that archive into its own separate folder.  If the subsequent folders each contain another part (a split archive, multiple RAR archives, parity data, etc.) you would then need to move each archive into a common folder for extraction.  A common example might be something like:

SoftwareArchive1.zip
SoftwareArchive2.zip
SoftwareArchive3.zip
SoftwareArchive4.zip
(more…)

Zeroing or “wiping” the data on a disk is a practice that makes data on a disk less recoverable.  This does not ensure that the data can not be recovered but it certainly makes data recovery more complicated.  It is always a good idea to wipe a disk prior to donating or retiring a computer to help protect confidential information.

This procedure will erase all data on the disk and make it difficult to recover – needless to say, you should backup any important data prior to using this procedure.  Also note that this only applies to standard hard drives.  Solid state drives require special handling as noted in this post. (more…)

You can use Disk Utility to create ISO images in Mac OS X:

1. Select the CD/DVD on the left-hand side of the window
2. Click “New Image+” on the tool bar
3. For “Image Format” select “CD/DVD Master”
4. For “Encryption” leave it at “none”
5. Rename the resulting .cdr file to .iso

Note that the CDR file format is exactly the same as ISO format – simply change the file extension so that the image is more universal.  You can also use hdiutil to convert a .dmg file to an ISO:

hdiutil convert original.dmg -format UDTO -o newisoimage.cdr

Again, simply rename the .cdr to .iso