Many people come to MyMac.com for the great unbiased reviews, user generated blogs, the podcasts that tickle our funny bones, and the spark and wit from the many talented writers that have found a home at one of the great truly independent Macintosh advocacy sites on the net. Then there’s the stuff that I write.
I wrote a feature last week on the trials and tribulations of installing a new and larger hard drive into a 14-inch iBook G4. The reasons behind going from a 40Gb to a 100Gb hard drive were many (more space, faster drive than Apple’s stock beast), but the biggest, most compelling reason behind wanting a bigger drive was this: Apple Loops for GarageBand. Last year I did a number of reviews of Apple Loop collections from various companies and they were all kind enough to send me some of their biggest collections. With the exception of one collection (quality wasn’t the issue, just the content), all were fantastic and really opened up my possibilities for loopy songs using either GarageBand or SoundTrack. Just one little problem. Gigabytes of loops that just wouldn’t fit on my iBook with the stock drive.
I got around the issue by doing what I normally do when faced with complex technological issues, I cheated. I found a solution at MacOSXHints. I won’t go back into it here (go to https://www.mymac.com/showarticle.php?do=something&id=1074 to read the original article), but I managed to dump about 20 Gbs of loops and GB instruments to an external drive. The downside to this was that anytime I wanted to use GarageBand on my iBook, I had to have the FireWire drive I had put the loops and instruments on connected. Because I’m incredibly lazy, this meant that I mostly stopped using my iBook when I wanted to use GarageBand. The worst part was that this was at best a temporary solution. All that space I managed to get back on the drive pretty much went away once I started filling it with other kinds of carp.
So, I got a bigger one and went through all the incredibly complicated steps required to replace a drive in an iBook. I think open-heart surgery would be less intensive, but that’s neither here nor there. I got through it and now had 2 and ½ times the amount of storage that I had before. Except that’s not the end of the story.
Once I had finished copying over all the information from the back-up I made, I figured all I had to do was to copy the loops and instruments from the external drive. Then, delete the shortcuts from the Library folders that pointed to the information stored elsewhere and re-index them once I got GarageBand going. It didn’t work.
I got error message after error message and GarageBand wouldn’t even start up. I didn’t give up however, and decided just to re-install GarageBand from my iLife 06 DVD. Slid it into my now unblocked slotted CD/DVD combo drive, selected custom install and attempted to just install GarageBand from scratch. Nope, didn’t work either. I was now starting to sweat. I deleted everything I could find with GarageBand’s signature on it and tried again. Frustration nearly as deep as being a Miami Dolphins fan (since I am one, I would know) was my reward.
As a last resort, I deleting everything I could find with the iLife software suite and tried one last time. Another miserable failure. Admitting defeat, I did the last thing I could think of. I got out my OS X 10.4 install disk and wiped the drive. Once that was accomplished, I went and got all the upgrades for 10.4 that Apple had released and spent a lot of time watching progress bars slowing make their way to completion as 100s of megabytes made their up my clogged internet tubes. I was finally able to install the entire iLife suite of programs. Then I started the equally slow process of upgrading that and re-installing all the loops and instruments from their original source DVDs. Finally I was rewarded with both SoundTrack and GarageBand starting up from my internal drive and being fully functional again.
AH bliss! The best part is that now that I have all this space, I could install the entire Final Cut Express HD 3.5 package! I’m really having a good time playing with LiveType and will go into my learning curve with that on another blog. Life is good. I have just one other little itsy-bitsy, teeny-weenie problem.
Microsoft Office 2004 refuses to work. Anyone want to take a bet on if I’ll wipe the drive AGAIN for that?
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