Technology Insights

How To Access Mac OSX Hard Drive From Windows 7 Computer

Insights2 Comments

We had a customer come in the computer shop the other day who needed us to troubleshoot an external hard drive that was crashing his Mac OSX laptop every time he plugged the USB cable from the external hard drive in. Once he left I removed the hard drive from the external hard drive enclosure and needed to find a way to access the data from my Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit laptop to verify the hard drive was functioning as expected. Use the information below to access an OSX hard drive, which is formatted either as HFS, HFS+, or HFSX, from a Windows 7 computer.

Technology Insights

How To Delete A Profile On Xbox 360

Insights5 Comments

Over the past couple of years I have had many friends use my Xbox 360 and in doing so they added their profiles to the device. Every time I want to login I have to sort through multiple profiles to locate the one I want to login with so I finally decided to clean up all of the profiles except for the primary one I use. You would expect the Xbox 360 interface to have a delete option directly from where the profiles are listed however it probably is not included there to cut down on accidentally deleting the incorrect profile. Below are instructions on how to delete profiles from your Xbox 360.

Technology Insights

Windows 7: Schedule A chkdsk On Reboot

Insights1 Comment

My Dell laptop has been claiming there is a hard drive issue for some time however when I reboot and let Windows 7 scan the drive it either doesn’t scan the drive or it scans the drive and still claims there is an issue. I believe the drive doesn’t have any major issues and that it has something else to do with the fact that it is a solid state drive. To get past the problem of Windows always claiming that it needs to scan the drive on reboot I scheduled a scan for the next reboot. Below is information on how to schedule a chkdsk scan on next reboot.

Technology Insights

Take The Hard Drive Out Of The Case: SimpleDrive Model #96300-41001-170

Insights17 Comments

A friend of mine who is a DJ dropped one of his friends external hard drives in the dark the other night while spinning at a club. Once he got home he attempted to plug his friends external USB hard drive, which is a 1TB SimpleDrive (model #96300-41001-170), into his computer but it was not being recognized. Once he tried a couple of other things he gave me a call to see if I could look at it. Without going into details about what was wrong with the hard drive itself I thought others might find it useful to have instructions including pictures about how to remove the hard drive from the SimpleDrive case. Below I describe how to remove the hard drive from a external USB 1 Terabyte SimpleDrive.

Technology Insights

DirecTV HR21: A Problem Has Been Detected In The Storage Device

Insights7 Comments

I was watching a television show late last night via my DirecTV account. The show I was watching has previously been recorded on my DVR and at the time two other shows were recording. When the show I was watching was over I attempted to delete it which it appeared to do but then it locked up one of the shows I was currently recording. Once locked up I was unable to use my DirecTV HD DVR HR21-700 remote to do anything. I waited for about 15 minutes to make sure it wasn’t recover since I had never had one of my DirecTV HD receivers do this before. After waiting that initial time period I decided to go ahead and reboot the receiver which I did by unplugging the power, waiting 15 seconds, and then watching it reboot through its normal cycle. The receiver appeared to be starting as it typically does until it got to the last two steps and after a couple seconds at the final step 1 of 2 the receiver got a blue screen with the message “A problem has been detected in the storage device” message as shown below.