MacOS Sierra Upgrade — Folder Question Mark and Pinwheels

Reading Time: 2 minutes Problem After upgrading to MacOS Sierra on a Mid-2012 Retina MacBook Pro with an aftermarket OWC SSD, the “folder with question mark” icon appears upon boot, and intermittent pinwheels cause hard-resets/crashes — especially coming back from sleep mode. System heats up during charging. Things Tried That Did Not Work PRAM Reset SMC Reset First Aid with Disk […]

OWC Aura Pro 6G 480GB vs. Stock Apple 256GB SSD

Reading Time: < 1 minutes Solid State Drive upgrade options for the MacBook Pro with Retina Display have finally come down in price enough to make them a reasonably good value.  Here’s a performance comparison between the stock Apple drive and the OWC Aura Pro 6G: According to Blackmagic, the OWC Aura Pro 6G 480GB meets the advertised specification, but […]

GParted: Windows 8 Boot Camp Partition “Missing Operating System”

Reading Time: 2 minutes Problem After using GParted to resize an NTFS bootcamp partition, Windows 8 fails to boot with “Missing Operating System”. Discussion There are commercial utilities for resizing a bootcamp partition like Camptune or WinClone, but they are unnecessary.  Disk Utility will shrink the OS X partition to make space.  Booting to a Linux USB Drive with […]