Tag Archives: Tips

Development

Installing iPhone OS 4.0 beta on the iPhone 3GS

The recent announcement of iPhone OS 4.0 beta brought some interested features for developers. I’m still pretty new to iPhone development and was trying to figure out how to update my phone. Below are the instructions once you’ve downloaded the IPSW file to update the firmware.

Installing iPhone 4.0 beta on the iPhone

  1. Make sure to have downloaded the iPhone 4.0 beta firmware that relates to your iPhone (e.g. 3GS).
  2. Extract the firmware IPSW to a folder.
  3. Connect the iPhone to your computer.
  4. Get the UDID registered on the iPhone Developer program. Provisioning Portal > Devices > Add Devices
  5. Open iTunes and click Restore while holding the Shift key (for Windows) or Option key (for Mac).
  6. Locate or browse to the firmware IPSW.
  7. Wait for iTunes to unpackage and install the firmware.

UDID can be view in 2 ways:

  1. In Xcode, navigate to the ‘Window’ drop down menu and select
    ‘Organizer’. The 40 hex character string in the Identifier field is your
    device’s UDID.
  2. OR In iTunes, select your device in the ‘Devices’ section and navigate to
    the Summary tab. Click on the Serial Number label to reveal the
    Identifier field and the 40 character UDID. Press Command+C to copy the
    UDID to your clipboard.
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Musings

Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910) with a USB drive

Quick n dirty Guide to Re-installing Windows XP on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 (910)

For fun to get blood pressure to suitable level.

  1. Go to Dell website and look-up the manual for the netbook. Note they mention re-installing operating system requires a optical drive and installation media. They forgot to add “Sucks to be you if you don’t have it”.
  2. Curse Dell for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

On a separate Windows machine

  1. Download WinToFlash (http://wintoflash.com/download/en/)
  2. Prepare a USB thumbdrive (1GB or more) and Windows XP CD-Rom (don’t have it? Borrow a suitable version that matches your netbook’s license)
  3. Unzip WinToFlash
  4. Run WinToFlash specifying your Windows XP CD Drive and USB Drive and let it transfer. Wizard mode works.

On Netbook

  1. Plug USB drive (with XP transferred) to Netbook
  2. Boot from USB Drive on Netbook
  3. Choose Option 1, run through XP setup process in text gui. Take note which your windows is going on, 1 (dell formatted) or 2 (most probably the case)?
  4. When done copying files, boot in Option 2 in graphical gui.
  5. When XP is done with setup, you might encounter a hal.dll missing error.
    • Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: <Windows root>system32hal.dll
    • Continue to boot from USB but select the debug boot “Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2″ in boot.ini on USB drive [multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)WINDOWS=”Debug boot rDisk 1 partition 2” /fastdetect]
  6. Allow Windows to finish setup
  7. Fix c:boot.ini (hidden file) to set default boot to “multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)”
  8. Copy i386 from USB drive to c:
  9. Start patching and installing Dell drivers from Dell support site
  10. Curse Dell again for not providing restoration disc or thumb drive and wasting your time.

Disclaimer:

This is quick guide for me to read if I ever need to do this again (I hope not). Works for me, if it doesn’t work for you. Post questions to WinToFlash forums instead.

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