Tech Jawa > Apple

Screen shot 2009-12-16 at 11.21.53 AM

Originally uploaded by CorneliousJD

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve purchased my MacBook.

MacBook 1,1
Model Version 1, Revision 1.

It’s been though hell and back, with a power adapter that lit on fire, a battery going dead, and a (still un-fixed) dead SuperDrive.

I recently realized that I also have the infamous failing hard drive that was shipped in some, but not all, first revision MacBooks. Yay for me!

This has been a known problem since a few weeks after the MacBooks were released, yet Apple still hasn’t issues any sort of official statement, or recall of its failing products.

I was lucky enough to get my power adapter and battery replaced, but that is only because they likely wanted to avoid any legal issues with A CABLE SMOKING AND SPARKING, CAUSING A FIRE IN A COLLEGE CLASSROOM!

I’ve been lucky enough to not have any major problems with this HDD yet, but I now know it’s only a matter of time before it grinds a hole through its top layer of the platter.

Alright…

Long story short.

I’ve got an original MacBook (white) with a broken CD/DVD drive, and I want to install Snow Leopard on Friday when it comes out.

I plan on buying a copy, but first I want to make sure I can upgrade somehow.

A co-worker of mine has a new uni-body MacBook, so I decided I should try putting my HDD into his MacBook and booting it today, just to make sure it goes without a hitch, and that way I could use his DVD drive to install the upgrade to Snow Leopard…

Well, here’s what happened when we tried booting.

Also note, there’s no Apple logo when it boots with this HDD?!?

The first time we tried it, it was stuck at “waiting for root device” and a reboot fixed it though, and it did the following.

Shutdown is weird too, also shown in the video.

Well well, if it isn’t that pesky Microsoft Office, screwing things up again.

Now if you ask me, my Documents folder should be for… well… documents. Not settings and user preferences, that belongs in ~/Library, for good reason.

If you want to hide the “Microsoft User Data” folder, you’re going to need the Developer Tools, and you can easily obtain them by inserting your OS X disk into your Mac, and just installing them

If you are unsure if you have them or not, open a Terminal and type

cd /Developer/Tools

If you get an “Error: No such file or directory.” then you’ll need to install them off the disk.

Once you’re sure you have the developer tools, then open Terminal, and type the following command.

/Developer/Tools/./SetFile -a V "/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Documents/Microsoft User Data"

After that you might need to restart Finder for the effect to show. You can do this one of two ways… One way would be to restart your Mac, but we all know that’s not ideal, so back to Terminal we go… If you havn’t already noticed, terminal is one of the most powerful tools you have available to you in OS X. Anyhow, go to Terminal and type:

killall Finder

This command will kill any processes for Finder, and Finder will automatically restart itself.

After that, head to your documents folder/stack and you should see the changes.

It has also come to my attention that if you’re using a Documents stack, that you may need to drag an icon in/out of the stack for that to refresh as well, as it’s handled by Dock.app and not Finder.app

Enjoy your now clean documents folder.