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CharlesS · May 26, 2004, 10:45 PM

APRIL FOOL!!!

Oh wait, it's not April anymore, is it... damn.*

That's right, folks, BootCD 0.6 has finally been released. You can download it here:

http://www.charlessoft.com/BootCD_0.6.dmg

Old versions continue to be available for older OS's:

http://www.charlessoft.com/BootCD-for-Jaguar.dmg
http://www.charlessoft.com/BootCD-for-Puma.dmg

Y'all can quit bugging me about this now!

*Yes, I originally planned to release this on April 1, just to get a rise out of everyone. Unfortunately, some bugs turned up at the last minute and I had to delay. Then it needed more testing, and then finals week started getting close, and things slipped back until now. Oh well, it would have been funny.

mitchell_pgh · May 26, 2004, 10:56 PM

For those that don't know:

BootCD is a Cocoa app that creates a disk image that can be used to burn a Mac OS X boot CD with a working Finder and Dock on it. This utility is unfinished and still has some flaws, but works. The current version works much better than previous versions, and includes the ability to run Drive10 and other utilities, although Norton does not yet work from the CD.

skateray · May 26, 2004, 11:10 PM

I can't get TechToolPro 4 to work yet, any suggestions???

I'm glad the wait is over, but it looks like they got some good beta testing in.

mitchell_pgh · May 26, 2004, 11:20 PM

Originally posted by skateray:
I can't get TechToolPro 4 to work yet, any suggestions???

I'm glad the wait is over, but it looks like they got some good beta testing in.

BootCD looks promising... I wonder what the major bugs are?

wataru · May 27, 2004, 12:19 AM

Yay! I was going to make a Drive 10 bootable CD yesterday, but I had forgotten that BootCD didn't work in Panther, and I don't have any Jaguar machines around. Now I can do it, no problem. Thanks for your had work.

CharlesS · May 27, 2004, 02:33 AM

Originally posted by skateray:
I can't get TechToolPro 4 to work yet, any suggestions???

That's surprising, I had several of my testers try TTP4, and they all reported that it worked. I hope I didn't inadvertently break it late in the development process while fixing some other bug that someone reported...

Exactly what happens when you try to run TechTool Pro? Do you get an error message? What does it say exactly?

CharlesS · May 27, 2004, 02:36 AM

Originally posted by mitchell_pgh:
BootCD looks promising... I wonder what the major bugs are?

The major bug is the usual one - there's always some machine configuration somewhere that ends up not working, because it's impossible for me to test every possible setup. Hopefully that should happen less often this time around, though, since I had more people test it this time. With the Jaguar version I rushed it out in an attempt to get people to stop e-mailing me, and the result was not pretty.

typoon · May 27, 2004, 08:11 AM

WOHOOO!!!! THANKS CHARLES!!! Been waitin for this.

kaboom · May 27, 2004, 09:59 AM

Sweet! Just made a boot CD for my new powerbook (15" 1.5 ghz) and added TechTool.
CD booted up no problem and TechTool ran fine.
2 things:
1) I assume that the ridiculously long boot time is because it's not a "proper" volume for OSX to boot from. Yes?
2) TechTool can't test the RAM because it does testing on virtual memory as well and since there's no vm to write to, it skips this test. Any way to fix that? Is it possible to point the boot CD to the internal HD to use as a swap disk?

No big problems really. Just thought I'd point that out.

Thanks for the sweet utility!

CharlesS · May 27, 2004, 12:33 PM

Originally posted by kaboom:
Sweet! Just made a boot CD for my new powerbook (15" 1.5 ghz) and added TechTool.
CD booted up no problem and TechTool ran fine.
2 things:
1) I assume that the ridiculously long boot time is because it's not a "proper" volume for OSX to boot from. Yes?

The long boot time is because there's quite a stark speed difference between a CD-ROM drive and an ATA/133 hard drive.

2) TechTool can't test the RAM because it does testing on virtual memory as well and since there's no vm to write to, it skips this test. Any way to fix that? Is it possible to point the boot CD to the internal HD to use as a swap disk?

Hmm, interesting idea. You'd need to:

1. Replace /var/vm on the CD image with a symlink to /Volumes/<your hard drive name>

2. Edit the /etc/rc file on the CD image and put the stuff back in there to start VM. Just copying and pasting out of /etc/rc on the hard drive should do the trick.

skateray · May 27, 2004, 06:08 PM

Originally posted by skateray:
I can't get TechToolPro 4 to work yet, any suggestions???

I did end up getting it to work, I was launching it from the disk image to check/put in the serials, and it said it didnt properly install. I just ended up burning it and it worked fine, i had to put in the serial for TTP4 when i booted from cd, so i asumme i will have to every time.

I installed it on the disk image, becasue i didnt think that the bootcd app selector would work for TTP4 b/c you cant drag it from drive to drive. Did anyone get it to work by just selecting it in bootcd?

CharlesS · May 27, 2004, 07:16 PM

Originally posted by skateray:
Did anyone get it to work by just selecting it in bootcd?

I believe that some of my testers did this during the beta period and wrote that they were successful. Maybe you could give it a try?

headbirth · May 28, 2004, 07:58 PM

I've notice a problem with DiskWarrior and BootCD. I get an error message about the Preview Apps Icon. Anyone else getting this.

Other than that and the sloooowww boot (about half hour to get to the desktop) seems to work.

CharlesS · May 28, 2004, 08:30 PM

Originally posted by headbirth:
I've notice a problem with DiskWarrior and BootCD. I get an error message about the Preview Apps Icon. Anyone else getting this.

If DiskWarrior was installed and had been run at least once from your hard drive at the time you ran BootCD, it should work. You'll still get some annoying errors in the Console about the icon, but it doesn't make a difference.

Other than that and the sloooowww boot (about half hour to get to the desktop) seems to work.

30 minutes? Yipes. It's about 6 or so for me. What speed CD/RW drive do you have?

Since EBCDIC · May 29, 2004, 02:55 AM

Originally posted by CharlesS:
The long boot time is because there's quite a stark speed difference between a CD-ROM drive and an ATA/133 hard drive..

CharlesS: congratulations on getting the Panther-compatible version out there.

I think the comparison ought not be between a CD-ROM drive and a hard drive, but rather "why does my BootCD take so much longer to get to the Finder than the Mac OS X Installer CD take to get to the Installer.app"?

headbirth · May 29, 2004, 07:26 AM

I'm using a new PowerBook G4 1.5mhz with a super drive ... not sure what super drive speeds are though.

typoon · May 29, 2004, 09:21 AM

I made a CD with TechTool Pro 4, Disk Warrior and Drive 10 all of them work great fromthe CD. A little slow but good.

CharlesS · May 29, 2004, 03:39 PM

Originally posted by Since EBCDIC:
CharlesS: congratulations on getting the Panther-compatible version out there.

I think the comparison ought not be between a CD-ROM drive and a hard drive, but rather "why does my BootCD take so much longer to get to the Finder than the Mac OS X Installer CD take to get to the Installer.app"?

The Installer CD loads what is needed to get Installer.app to run, and not much more. BootCD loads a ton of daemons and stuff which are needed to get all sorts of various things that people want to use to work, like loginwindow (which is needed to get the Apple menu and force quit dialog to work - don't underestimate what's needed to get this one to work), the Finder, the Dock, DiskArbitration, System Preferences, SystemUIServer, AppleShare, Disk Utility, DiskWarrior, Drive10, TechTool Pro, Safari, Camino, Mozilla, NetBoot, Apple Software Restore, and many, many, many more. In addition to a ton of apps people want to use, there's different types of apps I have to support - Cocoa and Carbon, of course, but also CFM, AppleScript, etc. Don't forget services like drag-and-drop, copy-and-paste, and such things either. I could take you straight to the Finder, which is what the really early versions of BootCD did, but you wouldn't be very satisfied with the experience.

There's also the fact that for many things to run, I have to make a RAM disk and copy a bunch of stuff onto it. However, this isn't the big sole reason for BootCD's long boot time as is speculated a lot on the Internet. It's a contributing factor, but there are many others as well. The primary reason is that the installer CD only needs to run Installer and Disk Utility, whereas BootCD needs to be fairly general-purpose. If you boot to the CD in Verbose Mode, you can watch what it's doing, and see how much time various different stages of the boot process take.

Yes, there's still room for slimming things down, and with every version I remove a few unnecessary things. And then someone wants to do something that doesn't work, so I have to add something else and it balances out.

CharlesS · May 29, 2004, 03:41 PM

Originally posted by headbirth:
I'm using a new PowerBook G4 1.5mhz with a super drive ... not sure what super drive speeds are though.

Now that's weird. I've never figured out why it randomly boots much slower on certain people's machines than it does on most others. I get about 6 min. with my 52x24x52x FireWire CD-RW drive. Most people seem to report about 10-12 minutes or so. Don't know why every once in a while it's huge like that.

malvolio · May 29, 2004, 05:29 PM

Nice work, Charles!

I did the defrag-the-disk-image trick, and my BootCD takes about 5 minutes to get me to the desktop.
The one "failure" I've had is that DiskWarrior won't launch from the BootCD, but gives me a message of "unexpected error (30, 2015)." I suspect this may be because I have one of the "unsupported" eMac models that supposedly cannot be booted from DW updater-created CDs.

CharlesS · May 29, 2004, 06:28 PM

Originally posted by malvolio:
Nice work, Charles!
I did the defrag-the-disk-image trick, and my BootCD takes about 5 minutes to get me to the desktop.
The one "failure" I've had is that DiskWarrior won't launch from the BootCD, but gives me a message of "unexpected error (30, 2015)." I suspect this may be because I have one of the "unsupported" eMac models that supposedly cannot be booted from DW updater-created CDs.

Does anything show up in the console when DiskWarrior fails to launch?

Sven G · May 30, 2004, 12:10 PM

It would be interesting to compare BootCD with the TechTool eDrive: it seems like the eDrive tries to copy a little too many - and probably redundant - items to its own "invisible" partition (like printers, user accounts, etc.), so one wonders if its space requirements (4 GB) couldn't be reduced, also in the light of the seemingly more efficient BootCD. Just some random thoughts, anyway...