Toasting the iMac and Firefox, and the usable browser window
I’ve toasted a bunch of things lately. Luckily, non-fatally.
First it was the iMac. I thought I’d try Bootcamp and install a dualboot with Windows XP. All the Bootcamp docs said to use XP with SP2 on the disk. “What the heck,” said little Jaanus. “XP is XP, I’ll just use an old boxed vanilla XP which I happen to have, nevermind that it doesn’t have SP2”. And off I went, repartitioned the drive with Bootcamp, started installing XP…
Then there was a weird moment when XP asked me to install on a 128G partition. I have a 250G drive and had made a 32G partition for XP. So this was weird. But what the hell, I thought, this wouldn’t be the first time where XP got its math wrong, so we just dash ahead and install. Umm… bad idea.
So the XP install completed, and it rebooted, and then… “cannot boot, insert disk” or something. Yep, I’d messed up the boot record, and could now boot neither in Mac OS X nor in XP. Crap. Well, at least I didn’t have any valuable data on that PC, so I was free to restore it from scratch with the Mac OS X installer disks.
It wasn’t so easy because initially the OS X considered my iMac to be a seriously toasted brick and refused to install on any partition that I fed it. I’m not sure what I did, but eventually I could install OS X again and try Bootcamp again with XP SP2. This time it went better, XP showed the correct partition size and installed fine. Hurrah, I got dualboot OS X and XP now, with support for the iSight and all that fancy stuff. Rocks.
So… then Firefox started messing with me. At home first. When I tried to start it after a previous session, it automatically crashed. Great automation. Not so great if you need to actually use it. And no way to recover except to kill your profile. Phew, nothing much was stored in the profile so no great losses.
Then the SAME thing in my other, work PC. Firefox dies on startup. This was no longer funny because I actually had some necessary bookmarks in this profile. (Which again proves the point that keeping data on the client side SUCKS. I want to simply go to an online service (.Mac for PC, anyone?) and hit “restore” to recover my whole thing without going through a zillion configurations. Nope. Doesn’t exist.) Sooo… at least the bookmarks.html file in the profile was good (this is where FF keeps the bookmarks), so make a backup of that, nuke the profile and restart. Then replace bookmarks.html with the old one and you’re almost there. Except that there are no extensions or customizations so you need to redo that stuff.
Ok, there was one good outcome of this whole Firefox frenzy. I was forced to redo and rethink my toolbars and extensions. And I found you can place bookmark folders straight on the menu folder (yay!) which helped me save a whole toolbar. I honestly don’t think you can get more minimalistic than this. And still have weather reports. Let me know what else I could nuke from here while still keeping it usable 
Check out these two extensions; they save your entire FF configuration, including combining all your extensions. Worked great when I had to rebuild my Windows PC recently: FEBE and CLEO (FF Extension Bakup Extension & Compact Library Extension Organizer)
One useful addition to Firefox is Google Browser Sync, http://www.google.com/tools/firefox/browsersync/
Browser settings are kept all centrally and you can sync between many machines. Voila - synchronized bookmarks, cookies, passwords, even browser settings. Leave 10 tabs open at work and start from where you left off at home.
I use it between home and work, desktops and laptops, and have never had any problems.
Not really an offline backup, theoretically you can lose the data there (mess up settings on one computer and these get copied to the central datastore).
Hi,
I had the same problem when I was trying to install Windows using Bootcamp when it asked me to install on a 128MB partition. Luckily, I didn’t proceed. Instead, I came back to check in Disk Utility and it shows that the windows partition is not mounted and I cannot mount it either in Diskutiliy or in terminal. I have tried like nights to find out the problem but in vain. Could you kindly tell me what you did so that Windows can detect the right partition with the right size?
Thank you in advance for your help.
Joey - you need to use WinXP with Service Pack 2, not simple plain old WinXP.
Jaanus - I indeed an using Service Pack 2. but I think it may be quite early a version. I am looking for a newer version to try again, too. thanx for your suggestion.