a few cool things

I recently got a new unibody Macbook Pro and moved my entire OS (from my old SR MBP) using Carbon Copy Cloner. For my Boot Camp partition, I used Winclone, but after restoring I ended up with a broken Windows install that threw STOP 0x0000007B every time I tried to start it. Fusion refused to start it either, giving me an “The Boot Camp partition is not prepared to run as a virtual machine” error.

VMWare refuses to boot it because the Boot Camp partition was created using Boot Camp Assistant, which defaults to FAT32, but my restored Windows used NTFS. There are instructions for changing the partition type to “07″ using fdisk in OS X, but my partition type was already set to that. Even though fdisk claimed to write a new MBR, VMWare still complained.
Windows shows a BSOD because it doesn’t have drivers for the new drive controller, which I can’t install unless I boot into Windows!

I can’t boot natively, and I can’t boot it in VMWare to fix the problems. Time for a fresh install? NO! There is a solution.
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For my fellow Toorcampers, here are the badge soldering instructions in case you lost or never got them:

1. Solder 10pf capacitor (the one with the pink line) into the holes labeled 1.
2. Solder the 22nf capacitor into the holes labeled 2.
3. Solder the LEDs into the holes labeled 3.
4. Solder the jumper into the holes labeled 4.

Notes: When the jumper is to the left, the left LED will light up when 13.56mHz is detected. When the jumper is to the right, the right LED will light up when 125kHz is detected.

Check out Mike Ossmann’s excellent hack for the badge, turning it into an RFID decoder using a standard sound card and analysis software.