5,301 views
Loading ...
One of the better things in Virtualbox over VMware Player is it’s ability out of the box to have host integrated two-way copy/paste.
What do I mean by that? Well, you fire up your guest OS – in my case XP – and you can copy/paste test from an application in XP to one in Ubuntu (or whatever else your host OS is) – and vice versa. Really useful if, as for most of us, you’re only putting up with a bloody awful guest OS because of a couple of critical applications – iTunes and Sharepoint Designer for me.
All well and good, but this exposed a horrible little bug in my latest iPod recovery (see previous post) as I was copying the Apple Computer software from the Guest OS to my spare XP box. A little bug exposing itself in the simple fact that I couldn’t copy/paste files or folders from within the guest OS!
This took a lot of digging around – together with no small amount of swearing – until I happened upon closing down the guest OS and looking at it’s settings; It kind of figured that you wouldn’t be able to use the host/guest bi-directional copy/paste to shift files back and forth, so I disabled this from the “Advanced” tab in the General settings, fired up the guest OS and – voila – all well and good and you can now copy/paste files and folders from within your guest OS to destinations relevant to it.
10,368 views
Loading ...
Ξ October 13th, 2009 | → 1 Comments | ∇ iPod |
Well, this is something that I get every time I apply an update to the firmware on the iPod Touch and, first time it happened – a mere half a day after I got the thing – I was more than a little gutted. I’d been playing with the little baby for a couple of hours, had fallen in love and was now faced with an apparently bricked piece of hardware.
First off, the error itself. As an Ubuntu user, I was running iTunes in an XP VM – which was working fine and dandy – under VMWare Player. This, in fact, was the only thing that didn’t work and – for what it’s worth – you’ll get exactly the same error under Virtualbox. It seems to be a timeout in the USB layer – I’m guessing that the firmware update is a little more rigorous than the day-to-day iTunes type stuff that goes on.
As luck would have it, I’ve got an old box with XP on it lying around. You’ll need to get all your odds and sods onto this box so take these following steps ;
- Install the latest version of iTunes on your old standalone (or a friend’s) XP box. (Assuming that you’ve got the latest version on your non-functioning copy)
- Pop into \Documents and Settings\<your name>\Application Data (This is a hidden directory) on the broken box and copy the “Apple Computer” folder and then paste it over the same one on your recovery box.
- Fire up iTunes on the recovery box and plug in your iPod.
- iTunes will detect an iPod in recovery mode and ask you if you want to fix it.
- As part of copying all that gubbins over, the firmware update will be there too – this will be applied when the iPod is restored.
- Once everything is up and running on the recovery box (this may take some time), unplug the iPod from the recovery box.
- Fire up iTunes on the original box and plug in the iPod. The backup that you took just before the update will now be restored to the iPod and all will be well again.
Rinse and repeat every time you have to update the firmware.
