Many years ago I was loyal to the Epson brand. When it came time to get a printer for photos, or even low run plain paper jobs, I would look around at the Epson offerings and select the model that seemed to fit my needs the best – while always looking for a networked solution that could be shared without having a computer as a hosting server.

As time passed, however, I grew frustrated with the Epson printers. The real problem I believe was my own fault in that they were rarely used and the heads would clog up sometimes making the ink needing to be replaced well ahead of time or in the worst of cases making the entire printer useless. That was years ago so for all I know things may have changed radically since then but no matter what the state Epson hardware is in currently that is at least my own story as to why I switched to HP.

The HP printers on the consumer photo side do not look as good as the Epson specs (at least for the evaluation I did a couple of years ago) but considering the actual output the HP I selected (the Photosmart D7560) offered everything I needed and with the addition of a printer server box (an HP JetDirect) I even got it networked too. I use it from Mac OS, Windows, and even iOS. The thing simply works great and the best part about it is I can leave it sit for literally months and when I ask it to print it still works without the least bit of trouble.

So, where does the story go from here? When I switched over to HP I still had a lot of Epson paper left and not wanting to waste anything I waited to go through it until I ordered what absolutely, positively, must be better for an HP printer – genuine HP paper. Heck, the HP paper even has a barcode on the back (I assume so the printer can identify it) and a rough surface on the back (I assume so it gets better traction through the printer).

The result? To me the HP paper is not better. It is not equal. It is, in fact, terrible. The HP Premium Plus Photo Paper that is listed as High Gloss is anything but. The lighter (white) areas keep a gloss whereas the ink saturated areas seem to handle reflection in greatly different ways. It does seem to get better if you let it dry for a week but thus far the side by side samples I have printed are easily picked out with Epson paper winning (from my untrained eye) hands down.

Epson vs. HP Printer Paper

The photo above (Epson paper on the left) gives you some clue as to what I am talking about but you really need to see it as it is exposed to a light source at different angles. The Epson paper has a continuous deep shine to it, as if you got it from a photo lab, and the HP paper simply does not. My bottom line is now I am back to using Epson paper on a HP printer (running genuine HP inks) and this time I am not waiting to go through my paper supply to switch back.

HP and Epson Paper

I would not go as far to say that this is a thorough test of any kind. Maybe I am missing something. Maybe your results will vary. My only advice would be if you have only run HP paper in your printer it might be a good idea to try something else. If you are like me the result might surprise you!

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It has been years since I faced the need to boot a PC without Windows up and running, in order to do some kind of hardware flash, and yesterday I decided to take the plunge. I had several Western Digital WD2002FYPS 2TB hard drives that were giving me fits and the information posted about a firmware update to go from 04.05G04 to 04.05G05 seemed like it would be worth a try.

I needed to run a file called 0405G05.exe in DOS with a file called 0405G05.bin in the same directory. At first I remembered that Windows XP would format a floppy and install a bare bones system on it thus making it bootable. Great, but then when I added up the sizes of the two files I needed after booting I remembered 2.1MB is a lot bigger than a 1.44MB floppy. (It really has been a long time since being in floppy world!) I then poked around with the idea of booting DOS from a CD. I found an image of DOS on the internet for a boot CD and thought I could just add my files to it, which I did, but when I booted I did not see them there. (Yes, they were on the CD but not visible from DOS – go figure that one) Replacing the CD after booting with one that only had my files did not work either. (It would not read the CD for some reason) I then toyed with using a USB drive to boot from but when I plugged in my multicard reader (as I had a spare 16MB CF card in my desk) I saw it mount with 4 drives instead of just the populated one. So I moved onto a single flash drive but it was 8GB big and only seemed to be able to format in FAT32 instead of FAT/FAT16. Needless to say I wasted several hours on it and was to lazy to even try to start editing CONFIG.SYS files on a floppy trying to get it to boot with CD support.

I was a Mac user lost in PC land and needed a real (not virtual) PC to flash my hard drives. After trying all of the above I found something that worked, and worked quite well, so without further talk of my trials and errors here is the solution:

Done! I wish Western Digital would just create a bootable iso for the flasher but without this shortcut available at least I now have a method in place for doing it again if needed, and yes, I am glad I still keep a PC hardware box in the house. Besides being a game host for the kids it still serves a cause when the hardware needs to be called on to work its ancient magic.

Maybe I am hallucinating but when I started this blog and made the decision to host it personally I looked at MovableType (MT) and WordPress (WP). MT I was somewhat familiar with from playing with it a bit years ago. I installed it but never used it enough to say it was really up and running the way it should be. Then not long ago I looked at the requirements for both packages and MT seemed to be easier to deal with. Yes, there were perl modules to load up, databases to choose from, and a horribly complicated perl installation (at least on the Mac OS) to deal with image files. Yet, somehow I remember WP being more complicated.

What? If I used drugs that could have been the explanation for now I have installed WP on the Mac OS with, what?, not a single extra third party whatever to be installed? How is that possible? On the server I added a database to mySQL, dragged the WP folder over, edited a few lines in the configuration file and I was pretty much up and running. Customizing? How simple compared to the learning curve of MT.

For larger reasons than what I certainly have read more about a WP user’s migration experience and why they migrated to begin with here.

Okay, as an update it was not quite as easy as that. To get the thumb nails for the image uploads to work I needed to compile and install GD. Fortunately there is a super guide here. I only needed to make two changes to their directions the first had to do with the jpeg library being updated and thus the URL changing to: jpegsrc.v7.tar.gz. The second was that I needed to remove the architecture targets I did not need for make to be happy. The bottom line it was still a simple and quick process compared to MT.

Well, I learned the hard way twice… I live a largely paperless life, my laptop (a MacBook Pro 17″) has my business world on it, I am a backup freak with Time Machine running along with Retrospect remote (or whatever they call the network service these days), and periodic backups of the backups taken off site for storage. When I am at the home office I have access to all kinds of tools, along with the backups, to get me out of trouble.

However, what do you do when you just landed thousands of miles away from your office and when you press the power button you never get to the login screen? I have run into this issue twice and here are the paths that got me up and running. I, fortunately, did not have a hardware issue either time and nor did I need access to my backups. (There is only so much I am going to travel with) So with some luck the below might help you as well. Be warned however! The actions below might take you into deeper trouble and kill some of the data on your system (you do have a complete backup at home? Right?) while on the other hand they might just save the trip you made from being a complete disaster.

The two scenarios that the below saved me from were quite different. The first was a situation where the Mac seemed to be booting normally but stalled on a clear blue screen with a spinning beach ball cursor. The second was a case where during the boot process the system was actually shutting itself down with a CPU halt. If one of these sounds familiar, or if you are brave enough to try the below out on a different situation, here we go…

Start with the basics and reset the PRAM and NVRAM:

Resetting PRAM and NVRAM

2. Shut down the computer.
3. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
4. Turn on the computer.
5. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
6. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
7. Release the keys.

Most likely resetting the PRAM and NVRAM did not do anything but it is always worth a try. If it did not work try booting in single-user mode. To do this boot the Mac with the Command-S held down. If you see a bunch of stuff start scrolling down a black screen and eventually end at :/ root# prompt this is a very good sign. If you have no luck booting in single-user mode then scrolling down to the second path might still be worth a try.If you have trouble with the below because the disk is in a read only mode enter:

mount -uw /

and everything should be fine.If you are getting a CPU halt during the boot process try running:

fsck -fy

The very fact that the system cannot recover on its own will probably mean that fsck will fail. Under normal circumstances fsck might find some errors, fix them, and end with a message that the disk has been modified. If this is the case, run it again until you get a message stating that the disk appears to be okay — this might take up to four times. When you finally get the okay message do a:

reboot

…and all should be okay. If you are hosed in a way that fsck cannot recover from it will simply fail and not modify the disk. So, here we split into two paths:1) fsck is ending fine but I still cannot boot. The process proceeds when I reboot to end on a blue screen with the beach ball cursor spinning and just sits there forever. In this case boot in single-user mode again and navigate to the /Library/Caches folder and delet all of the *.csstore files.

cd /Library/Caches
rm *.csstore

If you a technical user and want to poke around before doing the above you can try to see the system.log file in /var/log and see what might be going on in /Library/logs/CrashReporter as well.

After the cache files are removed do a “reboot” and hopefully all should be well.

2) If fsck is saying the disk is in trouble there is really only one way that I would recommend to continue from here and that is with DiskWarrior. If you are not prepared you might be lucky and find a copy at a local computer store or Apple store that is fresh enough to be able to boot in your system — but if there is an Apple store in the area you might as well just bring in your system! This will certainly work – however relying on finding a copy, or better yet an Apple store, locally is not a great idea. The second best thing to do is keep a DVD with you — however, traveling with a DVD and keeping it scratch free along with betting on nothing is wrong with your DVD drive is too much risk for me.

Here is what I suggest doing obviously well in advance before anything bad happens:

Buy a copy of DiskWarrior.

Buy a DataTraveler 200. (32GB is far big enough for a rescue stick)

At your leisure format the DataTraveler using DiskUtility with one partition and a GUID Partition Table in the Options… button. Of course I am assuming you are running an Intel Mac and if you do not select the proper partition format you will not be able to boot from your USB drive. From here install a fresh copy of Mac OS 10.5 on it and let the updater do whatever it needs to bring the system up to date. (This will take a long time via a USB flash drive) When you have a working copy of Leopard installed you can then add DiskWarrior to the drive along with any other recovery tools you might want to have with you on the road.

So, you had the above prepared but how do you boot from it? Simply plug it in a USB port and boot with the option key held down. You will be presented with the boot manager a

llowing you to select the rescue stick you created ahead of time. From here you can run DiskWarrior which has been my savior for many a disk problem. While I was away it found a good number of errors it was able to correct and a few orphaned files that I had to put back where they belonged after it ran. Fortunately nothing was actually corrupted. (Hint, if you are using a DiskWarrior DVD then boot from it by holding down the ‘C’ key)

Not much is going to save you from a dead or massively corrupted hard drive on the road but the above might just get you working in most cases. Why a USB flash drive instead of a portable hard drive? As attractive the small hard drives are in today’s world — heck, with a large capacity one you would probably be able to create a small rescue partition (as defined above) as well as maintain either a Time Machine backup or better yet a SuperDuper! image on the same drive. The real answer comes down to how much are you going to take on your travels and how reliable do you want your tools to be. For me the idea of something that takes up almost no space and has no moving parts to break is a perfect concept.

One final warning! DiskWarrior as with any other disk recovery program can work as much magic as it can do harm. If you are stuck (and have the peace of mind of a backup at least somewhere in the world) then working directly on a bad disk may pose little risk…otherwise, good luck, you are really on your own.