Aftermac's Personal Computer Cache

Jim Tanous at "The Mac Observer" ( www.macobserver.com ) wrote an article this week featuring my home office in his new weekly column "TMO Workspaces". Here is a link to the article: http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/tmo_workspaces_jason/ The Mac Observer is a well-respected news site in the Macintosh community that I have been following for over a decade, and it was an honor having them run a feature on my home office. Thanks, Jim!

For years now, I've done business solely by word of mouth, relying on clients to refer me to other potential clients, and so on. This practice probably nets me $1000-$2000 per year in computer repair work. I've long had grandiose plans for an elaborate website, but never have the time to put it together. It's long overdue to have some sort of a web presence, so I've thrown together a very simplistic page that I can slowly expand as time allows. http://www.aftermac.net Now that I've made this step, who knows what's next... A Facebook page? Gasp!!

Currently, I'm working on a laptop for one of my clients and thought I would share a few of the FREE hard drive utilities that I used to get the computer back in working order. First, after a CHKDSK scan revealed and successfully relocated 3000-some-odd bad clusters, I informed my client that the HD would need to be replaced. At this point I decided that cloning the HD to a new drive would be a reasonable course of action. A new 500 GB HD would replace the old 250 GB drive. Here are few utilities that I used to accomplish this: Clonezilla (  http://clonezilla.org/  ), is a Norton Ghost-esque, Debian Linux-based drive cloning live CD. Clonezilla offers several different methods for cloning drives, but for my needs I opted to download and burn the latest stable CD-ROM bootable .iso image to CD. I attached the new HD to the laptop using a SATA-to-USB adapter cable, booted from the Clonezilla CD, and performed a direct local disk to local disk image. The imaging work...