Please contact your system administrator.
I’ve been collecting the increasingly easy-to-find examples of American ignorance for a while now, so I think it’s time to start displaying them. Most of these come from two primary sources, Florida and airports. You’ll see what I mean as the collection grows.
I think I’ll start out with one of the most common indicators that something is terribly wrong with the way we’re educating our workforce. You, no doubt, have yourself seen examples of the kind illustrated here. They seem to plague airports more than anywhere else, except the desktops of the hapless “knowledge workers” who must sit in fear everyday of a similar event occurring on their “information appliance.”
I’m glad the auto industry doesn’t hire the same computer “science” graduates to program the computers that run our cars. Can you imagine what your daily commute would be like if you never knew whether you speedometer might suddenly (and sometimes did) display the message “Please contact your system administrator”?
There is a lot of helpful (and some not so helpful) information on the web now about how to configure an Intel Mac to boot up into Mac OS X, or Linux, or Windows. (Don’t ask me why, if you don’t know, then you’re one of the lucky ones!)
One problem that has plagued many people who have tried this, and for which I could not find a solution, is that when everything is done, Windows won’t boot past it’s initial logo screen. It gets there and after few seconds the system restarts. After a long fruitless search, which did yield some interesting clues, I took a look at the files on the Windows partition as it was mounted in Mac OS X. Now, I’m no Windows guru, but I do have a knack for understanding technologyies… if you can call Windows a technology. At any rate, the file “boot.ini” caught my eye. It looks something like this:
boot loader] timeout=30 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
So I opened it up in TextEdit and lo and noticed the lines that specify the partitions that the boot loader and operating system(s) are on. Well, I knew that Windows was on disk0s4 or in layman’s term, the main hard drive, fourth partition. I changed “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP…” to “”multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(4)\WINDOWS=”Microsoft Windows XP…” but found that the Windows volume (or partition) was mounted read only. No problem, I just rebooted into Linux and mounted the Windows partition as read/write. The nano editor made quick work of making my change and lo and behold, Windows could boot. (By the way, I did make a backup of boot.ini and I used the -w option of nano to prevent it from adding a linebreak in an extra long lines (like the one I edited) that might be in the file.)
So, there you have it. A triple boot Mac Pro running Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), Ubuntu 8.0.4 and Windows XP SP3. Oh happy day!
