Having figured out how to keep a Ubuntu machine up to date without connecting it to the internet, I'd like to be able to do the same for the fink installation on my iBook. It's not too hard, but there doesn't seem to be a single set of instructions for how to do it so I've gathered together the necessary steps here.

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Both Linux and Mac OS X are Unix based so you'd think that it would be easy to format a removable drive so that both could easily use it. Not so. Never has the acronym "Gnu's Not Unix" been more apt.

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My hard drive on my iBook just crashed. The system hung and wouldn't reboot. I tried safe mode, but it still wouldn't hang. I booted up from the install disk and ran DiskUtility. That said that there were no problems with my disk, but it wouldn't mount it. Trying it manually also didn't work (not all that surprising as DiskUtility is just a front-end for fsck and mount). On booting in Verbose mode I found that the first error message involved the journal checksum. So it seems that journalling - designed to help you recover from a crash - is the cause of the problem.

I'm in the middle of fixing it as I write.

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