Month: February 2008

I was having some real headaches getting mysql to work with a fresh install of php5 and IIS on a windows XP machine earlier. I was eventually put out of my misery by this excellent how-to.

The trick is: do not use the installer – it comes without mysql support by default. Use the zip package and follow the relevant instaructions in the article mentioned above, to configure it for mysql support. In addition to the steps described, I also found I had to move my php.ini file to the windows directory for to be picked up.

I recently got a mac mini and decided to give bootcamp a try as I needed a native windows machine from time to time. I initially created a 10GB bootcamp partition, thinking that would be enough, but after installing Visual Studio and a load of other stuff I was soon down to about 200mb. I had been fooled by the bootcamp setup into thinking that it would allow me to resize the partition later, but it doesn’t – the only choice you have is to delete the partition and start again. I didn’t want to install windows yet again, so after googling around I found an excellent bit of free software called WinClone. This allowed me to create an image of the bootcamp partition from within OSX, then delete the bootcamp partition, create a new one – (20gb this time) and restore the windows image. The added bonus is that I now have a backup of the windows install, should I ever stuff it up.