If you're having a hard time getting Boot Camp to correctly install Windows and you're getting either a "disk error" or "hal.dll missing" error, here's how to actually fix it.

First, you'll have to restore your disk to a full Mac OS X partition.
Then, you'll reformat it to be a Mac OS X partition and a Windows partition (using Boot Camp).

This is now the important step. You must write over the partition. So load up the Terminal and enter


sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdisk0s3 bs=1m count=100

Where rdisk0s3 is the disk where the Windows Partition is. To know the name of your Windows partition, you can go to the Disk Utility (Applications-Utilies) and look for a partition under your hard drive.

When that is done, you can restart your computer with your Windows CD and install it. Everything should be fine now.

PS. Use at your own risk. The command involve writting 0's to your partition table, which might screw it up if done unproperly.

PPS. I cannot be held responsible for anything happening to you or your computer.

26 Dec 2006

Firefox being slow?

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firefox fasterfox

If you've been having some problems with your connection or especially with firefox, check if you have FasterFox. If you indeed do, please uninstall this crap. I was on dnsstuff.com and got blocked by one of their script telling me I had FasterFox (which in that case was true, even though I generally don't install that thing). I was having a hard time loading pages for no reason but I had good internet download speed using FlashGet.

In the end, I removed FasterFox, restarted FireFox, everything is back fast and furious :).

30 Nov 2006

DVD not detected in Windows XP

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windows dvd

If you're having trouble with your DVD not being detected in Windows XP while being detected in the BIOS, this is THE solution you've been looking for.

This problem is generally caused by the Adaptec ASPI drivers needing to be updated. The best way to fix this problem is to download the latest Adaptec aspi_471a2 drivers. You can download them at Softpedia.com.

Good luck!

05 Jun 2006

RICHTX32.ocx registration fix

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windows dll

"richtx32.ocx" is not an executable file and no registration helper is registered for this file type.

I had this thing always appearing while using my FTP software so I had to fix it. I looked all over the internet to find any possible fix but no one gave me the answer I was looking for. After a while I decided I would try to find out the latest version of this file and almost every place I went to, I found the version 6.0.88.4 which was the one not working for me. Then I went to http://www.martin2k.co.uk/ and grabbed his Microsoft Rich Textbox Control 6.0 (SP4) (richtx32.ocx) which was version 6.0.88.77. By executing regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\RICHTX32.OCX on my winXP computer, the damn thing finally registered itself!

04 Jun 2006

Redirect to www

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apache .htaccess rewriterule

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^your-domain-here\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.your-domain-here.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

This code placed in your .htaccess will give you the possibility to send any visitor coming to your-domain-here.com to www.your-domain-here.com. This has a great advantage especially with search engines because all your pages will be referenced under the same "subdomain" as if you had both, you'd get www.your-domain-here.com links and your-domain-here.com links which would count as different pages.