Overlooking the story, my issues are with the avatars themselves and the program surrounding them. A lot just didn’t make sense to me. Think back to the first Terminator movie, where we learn only items surrounded by living tissue can time travel. But in Terminator 2, the liquid-metal T1000 was able to time travel as well. If the T1000 can’t create complex chemicals (such as a bomb) or moving parts, how does it simulate skin and clothes? Either Kyle Reese is wrong in T1, or the hero T800 is wrong in T2, or both. In much the same vein, I had some problems with an otherwise decent movie.

Are the avatars brain-dead? The avatars appear to have physical brains, in order to control the bodies. But are the brains empty shells? Are they in a coma when not occupied? This is not altogether different from a question regarding full-body cloning: is your clone brain-dead? Should a life (and a clone is living) be created for the purpose of harvesting parts? Is a clone “better” than an animal or pet? Does it have “human rights”?

And speaking of occupied, what mechanisms are used to actually control the avatars? What kind of hardware, presumably in the brain? It’s convenient that the electromagnetic flux that prevents the human’s missiles from being guided, do not interfere with the avatar remote control. What is the nature of the link? Once established, there appears to be no time lag between thinking an action and performing it. Is the consciousness transferred (no), and how does one overcome dual sensations between the “real” body and the avatar’s?

Why do the avatars have five fingers? (The Na’vi have four fingers.) A fine feat of melding human and Na’vi DNA allowed every other physical aspect to be identical except the hands. Since humans want to blend into Na’vi society and gain trust, there is no reason for having five-fingered hands. The only reason I can determine is it’s a convenience for us, the audience. It was a very jarring break from suspending my disbelief. This aside from the compatibility of human and Na’vi DNA, interbreeding (if Neytiri and Jake have children), etc.

Pandora’s biosphere is compatible with human DNA, allowing Dr. Augustine and Jake to transfer their consciousnesses to their avatar bodies? It was obvious from Dr. Augustine’s remark the biosphere is a neural network, how Jake would get to walk again.

The RDA corporate stooge (Selfridge) was a total copy of Carter Burke from Aliens. I almost prefer seeing Paul Reiser reprise the role if that was the intent.

The exoskeletons come with larger-than-life knives? Really? Seriously?

It’s too bad not to see the Na’vi use human weapons. Our male Avatars have avatar-sized guns, but there are only two? Some kind of expositional refusal by the Na’vi would have been nice.

That’s enough to think about, aside from the movie’s themes of corporatism, greed, terrorism, biodiversity, and other plot points that balance the movie toward Pandora’s indigenous life.

The good news: with a decent speed hard drive and 4GB memory (the maximum on early 2009 Mac minis), this little box is great! UI response is crisp, and the system boots as quick as could be asked.

The bad news: as various online reviews mentioned, this is one of the harder upgrades to perform. Actually installing the RAM and hard drive is straightforward as on other systems, but getting there is a beast! I also consider the base mini barely usable except for the basic tasks. The system’s paltry 1GB is taxed after loading two or three applications. Definitely upgrade the RAM to 4GB (a $64 upgrade direct from Crucial, see the links below).

There’s many sites documenting Mac mini disassembly so I won’t go into great detail here.

Cracking the case required modifying a putty knife, to give it a beveled edge to wedge between the aluminum case and the plastic fingers holding it to the bottom. Remove the three antennas from their stands. Next was finding four black screws hidden in black recesses at each corner. After disconnecting a ribbon cable, the black plastic top holding the DVD drive and hard drive can be separated from the motherboard.

With the drives out of the way, replacing the RAM was easy, it’s in the left-front corner on the motherboard. One poster on the Apple discussion site had difficulty installing the upper DIMM, but I found sliding it between the upper and lower retaining clips the easiest method.

Getting to the hard drive was straightforward but required removing the DVD. The screws on the drive’s right side are a little tricky to put back due to the recesses, unless you have a magnetic-tip screwdriver or are careful manipulating the screws.

Here are some things I noticed on other sites mentioned in passing:

• Before taking the black plastic top piece, be sure to remove the connector on the attached circuit board. It controls the speaker (I left it unplugged on my first reassembly) for sure, and possibly other stuff (does anyone know?).
• When replacing the hard drive, transfer the two cushions from the old drive. They act as shock absorbers to cushion drive from the motherboard components.
• The Mac mini will sound terrible when removing and installing the aluminum outer case. As others have said, it sounds worse than it really is.

One of my cats was thrilled for me to do this. Ok, she was more “meh” and took a nap instead.

Resources:

• Macworld Mac mini upgrade recommendations: http://www.macworld.com/article/140575/macmini2009upgrade.html
• iFixit  Mac mini teardown: http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/Mac-mini-A1283/659/1
• Unboxing and teardown @ macminicolo: http://www.macminicolo.net/macmini2009.html
• iFixit 1TB Mac mini (2x 500GB drives): http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/Mac-mini-A1283-Terabyte-Drive/660/1
• Memory upgrades at Crucial: http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?model=Mac%20mini%20(Intel%20Core%202%20Duo%202.0GHz%20DDR3)%20MB463LL/A&pl=Apple&cat=RAM
• Memory upgrades at Crucial, main Mac page: http://www.crucial.com/mac/index.aspx

Alternatively, one boots with the XP install disc and select the Recovery console. Temporarily remove the system, hidden, and read-only flags from boot.ini. Delete boot.ini. Run bootcfg /rebuild to create a new boot.ini file, and scan drives for Windows installations to add to the boot loader.

One should be able to remove all the attributes at once using the command attirb -h -r -s c:\boot.ini. Also, instead of deleting it, I would rename it, such as to bootini.old, until the system is working properly.

Resources:

• Spotmau check boot path page: http://www.spotmausupport.com/check-boot-path/
• Intuitively fixing BootCamp (not recommended!): http://blog.blackrobes.net/2009/06/bootcampin-the-night-away/

The past year or so, I’ve not used BootCamp because I did not know how to transfer the BootCamp partition to my new hard drive load. By default, OS X can read from, but not write to, NTFS partitions.

Enter Winclone, a free utility to backup and restore BootCamp partitions. It creates a backup image of your partition, which you can copy to other Macs and restore. (Kids, stay legal!) I whipped out my original MBP hard drive, hooked it to my trusty SATA dock, and ripped the BootCamp image. Because Windows was not installed in BootCamp, my image file was 1.4MB; that’s right, it could fit on a floppy disk!

Flush with excitement, I created a fresh BootCamp parition on my new hard drive and restored it with Winclone. Hooked up the external drive, reboot, select “Windows” from the boot screen. Fail! The USB drive flashed and posted this error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.
Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

To understand how Windows finds the XP install, the boot loader looks in file boot.ini on the boot drive. (The boot drive and the system drive / partition can be different.) This error indicates it could found and read boot.ini, but could not find the Windows install. Fortunately, boot.ini is on the internal BootCamp parition and reviewing it showed:

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

The interesting bits are on lines 3 and 5; specifically, partition(3). I theorized that perhaps partition 3 was not valid in my new install, that it should be partition 1 instead. So I downloaded NTFS-3G for OS X (see below for the link), and edited boot.ini, changing the two lines from partition(3) to partition (1):

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect

Et voilà, the next reboot was a success!

Resources:

• Making a custom XP install disc with USB support: http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8
• Winclone home page: http://twocanoes.com/winclone/
• NTFS-3G for OS X: http://macntfs-3g.blogspot.com/

The RAM modules do not need to be removed from the laptop to disassemble it. However, I’m a masochist and removed them anyway; it’s one less thing to damage if the screwdriver slips.

Instead of restoring from Time Machine, I performed a “Restore” using Disk Utility. I restored the internal drive to the new drive (using a SATA docking station), then swapped the drives.

After the swap, the system started slower than normal. The boot screen briefly showed a folder with a question mark before the Apple logo and startup bong. A quick search revealed I had to set the startup drive in System Preferences: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS1440. Once done the system boots quickly. I assume that restoring from the install disc and Time Machine correctly set the startup drive preference.

Using the Disk Uility restore method, the destination drive showed more free space than the source by a few GB. I believe this is because the Spotlight cache is not restored to the destination drive. Immediately on logging in, Spotlight started indexing the new drive. After indexing, the free space was in the ballpark of the original drive.

Here is a picture of all the screws removed (click on it to see full size). My preferred disassembly order (top to bottom) is:

• RAM cover screws (4)
• RAM cover removed
• Screws under RAM cover (2)
• RAM modules removed
• Left: Side and back screws (13), Right: hinge screws (4)
• Hard drive hold down and screws (2)
• Left: bare hard drive screws (2), Center: new hard drive, Right: hard drive screws with bushings (2)

The ifixit site has a step-by-step guide for disassembling the MBP: http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Repair/MacBook-Pro-17-Inch-Core-Duo-Hard-Drive-Replacement/319/1

Flash forward to last Wenesday. I found the poor Dynex eSata card under a pile of papers on my desk, and wondered if anything changed in the past year. I researched some links I used previously (namely, the Leopard and Silicon Image 3132 discussion, see below) and found some new ones. I took several steps in tandem (the shotgun approach) but now the drive appears to work correctly with eSATA. I’ve had no issues with Time Machine, or the drive freezing or disconnecting. The issue is resolved!

What did I do?

1. I installed the latest Silicon Image 3132 drivers for OS X Leopard: SATARAID5, version 1.5.16.0. By itself, it did not fix the problem. It appears Silicon Image focused on providing the SATARAID drivers, as most people in the discussions have had the best luck with it, and there is no harm in using the drivers with non-RAID cards. (Although, most two-port eSATA cards support software RAID). Link to Silicon Image drivers for OS X Leopard: http://siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=32&cat=3&os=3
2. I turned off OS X’s hard drive sleep mode. There are two places to turn it off. The first is in System Preferences, Energy Saver, Put the hard disk(s) to sleep when possible. (You may need to click the Show Details button to see this option.) The second is a developer tool, found in /Developer/Applications/Performance Tools/CHUD/Hardware Tools/SpindownHD. It allows for global enabling and disabling of hard drive sleep modes. The web page where I found this hint suggested that OS X only sends those commands to drives connected via FireWire or USB. Link to MacNoob page: http://www.macnoob.net/blog/2008/05/the-sleepy-western-digital-mybook-saga/
3. Finally, I upgraded the firmware on the Western Digital MyBook Studio. The web page had a lot of perquisites, including uninstalling the Western Digital Drive Manager (which I use to manage the RAID on the MyBook Pro drive), temporarily disabling Time Machine, and connecting the drive via USB. (The firmware update only works via USB.) Once the prereq’s were done, the update itself went smoothly. Link to Western Digital firmware update: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=113&sid=60&lang=en
4. There is no step four! I powered down the drive and connected it via eSATA, and everything has worked like kittens. I’m on day three and have run the gamut of sleep mode, inactivity, Time Machine, on-demand access, and everything has just worked!

Now that my eSATA issues are sorted out, I’m thinking about moving to a Mac Mini… but that’s another story for later.

Resources:

• OS X Leopard and Silicon Image 3132 discussion: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=378576
• Silicon Image drivers for OS X Leopard: http://siliconimage.com/support/searchresults.aspx?pid=32&cat=3&os=3
• eSATA on MacNoob blog: http://www.macnoob.net/blog/2008/05/the-sleepy-western-digital-mybook-saga/
• Western Digital firmware update: http://support.wdc.com/product/download.asp?groupid=113&sid=60&lang=en
• Removing the Western Digital Button Manager/Drive Manager: http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=392081
• Another link on removing the Button Manager: http://www.theosquest.com/2007/07/16/wd-my-book-button-manager-removed-and-some-frustrations/
• I found Drive Manager on my Mac in /Library/Application Support/WesternDigital/WDDriveManager. Drag to the desktop to uninstall (may require your administrative password).

I read about the Western Digital 320GB Serial ATA drive and its compatibility with the Mac. Most posts were along the lines of “no problem, but disable the Sudden Motion Sensor.” So I took the plunge on 3/21/2008 and replaced my internal drive.

Before powering down:

I’m running a MacBook Pro 17″ (Core Duo, designation 1,2), OS X Leopard with the latest updates, along with Time Machine backups to an external Firewire drive.

Be sure to print off the iFixit disassembly steps, or have another computer available for viewing the pages. I loaded up my old Windows XP system for online viewing.

The Time Machine restore process does not restore your Boot Camp partition. Use a Windows backup and restore utility for the Windows side. I use the Boot Camp partition for directly booting to an external drive installation of Windows, so this was a minor issue for me.

On skill levels:

While the process was straight forward, I’ve worked with computers for over 25 years. And as Norm Abram would say, I have the right tools for the job. If you’ve never taken apart a computer before, especially one as densely packed as a MacBook Pro, I do not recommend starting here.

A note on disassembly and your warranty:

Unlike a MacBook, the MacBook Pro’s hard drive is not intended to be consumer-replaceable. However, you will not void your warranty by performing this procedure. Although Apple will not cover any damage directly resulting from replacing the hard drive (such as damaging the cables or main boards), other components remain under warranty. I am not a lawyer but many Apple support discussions confirm this thinking.

Blackrobes.net is not responsible for any damages resulting from this procedure. While every effort is taken to ensure the accuracy in this article, each user’s experience level plays an important role in the outcome. To reiterate: if you’re not confident about disassembling a $2,000-$3,000 laptop, do not attempt!

Disassembly and installation:

Following the steps at the iFixit site (iFixit MacBook Pro 17? hard drive replacement) were well laid out, though I took liberty for a couple of steps.

A Phillips 00 and Torx T6 drivers are required. I already had a 00 driver, so went to Sears to pick up the T6 for $3.99.

Disassembling the MacBook Pro involved removing the battery and RAM, then every screw you can find! iFixit has a good order on removal. There’s three types of screws: short Phillips, found on most of the case exterior; long Phillips, for the hinge assembly; and two Torx screws astride the RAM slots. If I counted correctly, you’ll remove 25 screws before breaching the case.

Removing the case top (keyboard, trackpad, and speaker grilles) was a bit tricky, and required patience. Lift slowly as not to damage the cable connecting the top to the main board.

iFixit recommends disconnecting the keyboard cable from the main board. Instead, I elected to lean the keyboard against the screen, as if opening the laptop screen. The cable had just enough play to do so. Since the area we are concerned with is the lower left side containing the hard drive, it isn’t in the way.

To remove the hard drive, I removed the two Torx screws to free the right-side bracket. Instead of removing the hard drive cable, I simply freed the tape from the top of the drive. Do so carefully as not to damage the ribbon cables. There is a piece of tape on the bottom of the drive as well, to hold in the drive connector. Ease the drive from the connector after holding back the top and bottom tape.

The original drive had four Torx pins to be transferred to the new drive: metal pins on the left side, which go into rubber grommets in the case; and rubber grommet pins on the right side of the drive.

Hints for reassembling the laptop: after seating the keyboard, close the lid and turn the machine on end, so the screw holes you wish to use face up. It is much easier to seat and fasten the small screws this way. Be careful not to drop a screw in the 1/4? jacks (a screw goes between the headphone and microphone ports), or the Firewire and network ports (same story here). When attaching the three screws in the front of the battery compartment, the screw hole on the side with the Firewire ports is magnetized. It took careful positioning of the screw with the driver to seat without being pulled toward the magnet. Also, it is easier to attach those angled screws when holding the laptop on end.

Bringing back the data:

I booted the system with the Leopard DVD, and ran Disk Utility to partition and format the internal drive. Note: If you boot with the external (Time Machine) drive attached, take care to partition the silver “bare” hard drive icon, not the yellow external drives. My internal and external drives are 320GB hence the caution.

The OS X installer has a bug where the Time Machine restore process does not always detect the internal drive if you partition immediately prior to restoring. As a workaround, partition the drive, the reboot to the OS X installer. The second time reveals the internal drive as a restore destination. Restoring the system using Time Machine took about three hours for 90GB.

The initial reboot after restoring was uneventful, and I logged in normally using my account.

Software notes after restoring:

• Forum posts recommend turning off the MacBook Pro’s Sudden Motion Sensor. Since the Western Digital drive has a SMS, it conflicts with OS X’s SMS and will kernel panic. To turn off Apple’s sensor, open Terminal and type:

  sudo pmset -a sms 0

  See the links below for the Apple site (Leopard users follow the recommendations for Tiger OS X 10.4.)

• Mail requires messages to be imported on the first run. I have over 60,000 messages, which took around five minutes. All my account information, mailboxes, and rules were preserved. The unread message counts were not up to date.
• iTunes requires re-authorization to play protected content.
• If you Boot Camped your internal drive, you need to run the Boot Camp assistant and recreate the Windows partition. Follow normal Windows recovery steps. Time Machine does not back up Boot Camp partitions.

Afterword:

BigSean and I compared recovery notes Time Machine versus Super Duper.

• Super Duper performs a bit for bit (exact) copy of the hard drive, so the software notes immediately above do not apply. Your hard drive is restored exactly as backed up.
• Time Machine performs “versioned” backups, and allows restoration of individual files, on-demand. However, the system restore excludes certain items as noted above.
• Super Duper and Time Machine can work together, but generally target different audiences. Expect an article in the future on Super Duper and Time Machine.

Links:

• iFixit site for MacBook Pro 17? disassembly
• Apple knowledgebase document for disabling Sudden Motion Sensor

Pictures: