My MacBook Wind

Last week, I decided to take a leave from work and, yup, I tinkered with my netbook. I tried to experiment with external monitors and graphics drivers just for kicks. I felt like it so I did it.

I was following a thread over at the msiwind.net forums and although I knew there was some issue with enabling mirroring mode, guess what? I still tried it.

Both displays conked out as soon as I enabled mirroring, I was seeing bars of shades of black and grey and then à la rainbow bright colors. In the end, I couldn't get past the blue screen even with the external monitor already disconnected. I tried what the forumers advised, removing some com.apple.windowserver.plist and so on files, but that still didn't solve my prob. 

So given the noob that I am, equipped with just guts and even lesser actual tech know-how,  I thought I'd reinstall. But my precious hackintosh files were still in the drive and I didn't have back up for them yet -- I was meaning to do it after the external monitor experiement but this tragedy happened. 

An idea struck me and so I took out my msiwindosx86 installation DVD, plugged in my iPod, booted from the DVD as if I were reinstalling. 

I was hanging all hopes on this one tactic: archive the files which were contained in a folder on my user's desktop to my main(root) /. And the copy the resulting archive to my iPod before I wiped out, once again for the Nth time, the entire content of the fairly used (and to some extent, abused) 160 GB WD SATA hard drive that came with the Wind.

Once I was in the installer window, I fired up Utilities > Terminal. 

Here is when I swish out my battered copy of Complete Linux. Ok, so what's Linux doing in this blog about Mac OS X? Well, it seems that knowledge of Linux commands is valuable if you wanna really get to know Mac OS X. Hey, OS X is Unix beneath the polished and posh Aqua interface and Linux is "Unix-like".

So here are the steps:

1) In the terminal :

tar cvf -f /Volumes/Macintosh HD/hackintosh.tar /Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/username/Desktop/Hackintosh Resource

the -f is the flag for indicating that you want what's happening during the archive process to display in terminal.

cp /Volumes/hackintosh.tar /Volumes/iPod's name/