Technology Insights

OSX Burn Image Message: The Disc Drive Is Busy. Please Choose Another Drive.

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When attempting to burn a DVD tonight I was getting a message from within the OSX Disk Utility stating that the Disc Drive was busy. At first I thought it must be a DVD that was not compatible with the DVD burner however I attempted to use three different types of DVD’s with the same message. Finally I realized that I had VMWare Fusion running and one of the VM’s I was using at the time was sharing the Disc Drive with the host OS or OSX. Below are more details about what the message from the OSX Disk Utility will look like and how to remove the disc drive from being shared with a VMWare image.

Technology Errors

My Dell Downloads Using Chrome – Application Cannot Be Started, Contact The Application Vendor

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After a had a conflict with Windows 7 Service Pack 1 that really slowed my PC down I decided to scrap my current Windows 7 install and reinstall. So far it is the best decision regarding this laptop that I have made in a long time. Not only are things  running much better but I was able to organize a lot better from the start. I needed to install some third party applications that came with my laptop including Roxio Creator Premier 10.3 which I use for burning ISO images and Dell makes these tasks very easy with the My Dell Downloads site. Initially I attempted to download these applications using my preferred browser which is Google Chrome however I received an error which I explain in detail below as well as how to use Chrome to download items from My Dell Downloads web site.

Technology Insights

How to Boot the Recovery Partition on a Acer Aspire when Alt – F10 Does Not Work

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I had a Acer aspire one in the shop today and it had a variety of critical Windows issues. While doing some tests one of the things I did was rebuild the windows boot loader using the /FIXBOOT & /FIXMBR commands from a recovery disk. What I did not realize is it seems Acer has a custom boot loader which allows for the keys Alt & F10 to be pressed on boot in order to reinstall from the recovery partition so when I reinstalled the boot loader I overwrote the Acer one. This prevented the Alt – F10 combination from being used to access the recovery partition. Now, normally if you can boot into Windows there is a icon in the start menu to execute the recovery program but in my case Windows was so messed up due to a bad chkdsk I was not able to do that.

Technology Insights

Convert a .daa File to a .iso in Linux using Poweriso

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Often times I still come across .daa files. Although we can burn these to disc as a image I prefer the .iso format. Anytime I get a .daa file I normally convert it to .iso for storage. .iso files seem easier to work with and more burning programs supChange into the newly port its format. I decided to make a quick post on converting these in Linux. As with every thing in Linux I am sure there are lots more ways to do this however my way is all via command line so it can be easily done via ssh on servers which, for me is very useful.

Technology Insights

Roxio 2010: The File You Are Trying To Use Cannot Be Edited, And Has Not Been Added

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When using Roxio Creator Premier 2010 to encode a video to DVD format and burn to disc I received an error. I have been burning AVI, MPEG, MP4, Quicktime, and other video formats using this version of Roxio Creator 2010 for some time so I was surprised to receive an error. Initially I thought that the error was caused by file permissions on the file because a friend had provided it to burn and this was the only initial difference that I could find with the video versus other videos that I had burned. Below I describe how to troubleshoot this error and what I eventually did to resolve and move past this error. In the end I was able to burn this video using Roxio Creator 2010.