Fuck.

[ibneko]

I shouldn't have posted the previous entry. Know what happened right after I did ('bout 5 minutes afterwards, anyways..)

My iBook DIED. Like, Got a line across the screen, then the screen started to fade to green...then purple... and now it doesn't boot anymore. It turns on, the fan runs on high continuously, and occationally, the screen will have shades of green and purple and white...

Fuck, fuck, fuck. And I haven't backed up anything other than music and anime for a while. So if I send it in and they do reformat my hard drive, I'll lose a good deal of work. Damn. Also means I can't continue my math homework and I'll have to start over from scratch.

It also means my calendar's unaccessable. And I don't remember much aside from the several upcoming tests.

I think. I think I had DAV turned on, so I'll have to check and see where I was sending it to.

Comments

[starkravingsane.livejournal.com]

*Hugs*
That sucks. Murphy's law is a bitch.

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

Yipe! Well, first thing I'd recommend is getting the HD out, and putting it into an external enclosure - at least you'll have all your data accessible. You could then either send it in like that, after checking with Apple that that's okay with them, or take advantage of the time to perform a full backup. (Unison might work, but Carbon Copy Cloner may be better suited, as I'm not sure if Unison's aware of resource forks - CCC uses ditto to copy files, which explicitly does copy both forks, where present. On the other paw, Unison clients exist for a range of OSs)

I'm guessing it won't work, in its condition, but can the iBook be put into Firewire target disk mode? Hold down "T" as it begins to power up. You'd then be able to mount it as a Firewire disk, using another machine.

Rescue

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

If you can boot from CD, and have access to a working computer with a CD-burner, there is hope. If not, um, many consolences.

http://www.gentoo.org/news/20030603-ppclivecd.xml

That'll get you bootable Gentoo Linux ISOs. Burn the ISO to a CD (not as a file, but using the "burn ISO" option in whatever burning application it's using). Take said CD and put it in your iBook. Boot up (you may have to make your BIOS boot from CD - usually doable by hitting 'delete' at startup so you can access all the bios settings. Find something akin to 'boot priority' and make sure CD is above hard drive).

Once you've booted up, you should be able to access your files on "HDA-1". Poke around there and find the vital files that you want to save. Now, find some way of getting them off the computer.

This is tricky. You can't use the built-in CD burner, because that's being used to run the OS. If you can access a USB-burner, you're lucky, and that should work. You should be able to access the internet, and you can find some place to store files there (perhaps mailing them to yourself - I'll send you a gig of gmail space if you want it). USB thumb drives also work, just make sure they're formatted in FAT32 first. After you've moved everything off, you can try reformatting or sending it in for repairs.

Ack, you probably already know most of this. But if it helps...well, that's a good thing.

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

Shit dude, that really sucks... it strikes me that you might have backed up the wrong things... Do you think it was the RAM?

and here I was about to tell you that I am in the process of installing Mac OS X panther on my PC--pearpc... I guess you don't want to hear about that?

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Heh, well, no, those were backed up mostly because I was killing time that day. The notes from class that I take, and such, don't get backed up because I don't keep a script running to do so.. and it's a bit of a hassle to plug in my firewire external just to copy a few megabytes of data, then eject it. But not anymore... Hopefully I'll have something up that'll sync automatically once I connect the firewire HD.

Mmm, nah, I'd be/I'm still interested in hearing it - tell me how well or how badly it runs.

Re: Rescue

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Hehe, trust me, I know just about all of the tricks there are to extracting data from a dead system, short of taking out the actual drive and hooking it into another system - Unfortunately, booting (from any drive) requires checking the sanity of the hardware first, which is where the system's dying at. Once past that point, I can fix practically anything (haha, just watch something happen to me now, when the computer gets back, that I can't fix.).

Thanks for the link, and the instructions :D And yes, I did know most of it, however, some things are different for Macs than for PCs. ie, booting via CD isn't done by mussing with the BIOS, it's done by holding down the "c" key. And USB thumb drives don't boot, as far as I know.. only firewire hard drives. And we use HFP and HFP+ as our formatting method, completely different from FAT32. And once in the OS, I'd probably use the 'net to save files - usually there's at least an ftp client in a backup disk/system like that.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

I'm not too sure I'm allowed to take the HD out without voiding the warrantee. I did ask the Apple tech to note that I wasn't able to back up data, and that if they could avoid formatting my hard drive, it would be appreciated. And yes, I know about CCC, which is what I would have used if it was possible.

Yeah, we've got target disk mode too - good stuff, that. But since I don't even get the boot chime, signifying sane hardware, I can't do that - note that the instructions for target disk mode, and booting from CD (which would also have worked for me) tell the user to hold down the key after the chime. But thanks for suggesting it anyways - it was one of the things I tried, but didn't work.

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

Well, the installer is slow as hell, of course part of that is due to the fact that I'm only giving it 512 RAM, I have 2gigs on this thing, so I thikn I'm gonna give it 1 gig sometime soon..

There is also the detail that PearPC is a 1:15 emulator, meaning that if we say I have 6hz of power with my p4 with hyperthreading (theoretically) then I should be able to run at .4 ghz ... :( but its fast enough for alot of things...

[porsupah.livejournal.com]

I'd think temporary removal of the drive would be fine, but you might like to run that by them, to be sure. I know I've read in articles on Mac mini RAM upgrading that it's fine to do that yourself, as long as you don't break anything in the process - obviously, that damage wouldn't be covered, as it wasn't a manufacturing problem. So if you stepped on the drive, that'd be a problem, but taking it out and putting it back in should be fine.

(As for how to do that, it's back to google.. pbfixit don't appear to cover any iBook G4s in their (otherwise very good) series of takeapart guides, unfortunately. With the TiBooks, it's a matter of taking the bottom case off, removing the short cable from the main board to the drive, and gently lifting the drive + rubber grommits out. The Wallstreet's slightly easier, as the drive's accessible by lifting up the keyboard, and it uses a tiny PCB rather than one of those cables - much more difficult to damage, though such cables seem fairly sturdy. About the worst is the clamshell iBook, which requires almost full disassembly.. not difficult, just fiddly, having to keep track of where each screw came from)

Re: Rescue

[jaiwithani.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the lesson :-). Yeah, I should have figured you knew more about this than the noob that is myself. USB thumb drives can boot on certain motherboards, or so I've been told. Then again, Jai's knowledge of Macs is smallmuch.

Good luck not losing everything...and boofor exploding hardware. Any chance of Apple fixing the system sans the hard drive?

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

http://www.engin.umich.edu/~fbartho/images/firstmacscreen.jpg

looking interesting... a bit slow, and yet perversely I doubled the RAM and increased the resolution and it is laggier...

*thinks*

[marbenais.livejournal.com]

::sighs and pets:: The uncontrollable factors of technology.  I'm not going to give any advice, since you know just what I know, so . . . good luck.

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Wow. That was sweet, the jpeg loaded from bottom up? How'd you do that?

But yeah, looks good. Mmm.. Hehe, my friend would have a fit if he saw a Mac system on a PC.. he hates Macs. ^^;;

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Question~ Have you hear of/about VMWare? Or WMWare? I'm not too sure what it is, but my friend mentioned it today, and said that it was cross platform- and you'd be able to run Mac on Windows, Windows on Mac, etc. I don't quite believe him, and google isn't turning up anything useful on a quick search, but I do recall coming across the name while searching for the Virtual Additions that was supposed to come with VirtualPC 7.

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

lmao you're the second person to notice that effect... Apparently mspaint has a hard time saving things as jpgs and kindof just saves them as bmps in jpg files and um... nobody else cares they all display it... except that in firefox they load from the bottom up... hehehe

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

So sweet though... It's spiffy... wonder if there's a way to do that without mspaint. And is it limited to firefox?

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

except that vmware doesn't support mac OS X
and yes I did hear about it ... I've played with it a little... currently I just downloaded a new beta of it... but it works pretty nicely for some types of linux... I don't like certain details of it... but it may or may not be reinstalled soon depending on how well this mac works... if it works nicely enough for me to use the pretty terminal windows then, I may not install a linux vmware till later...

One of the other things I could do is run coLinux but I don't really want to because that would require always running an xserver to my own computer...

its VMware a company by that name makes it. very very big

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

too lazy to test it in iexplore, but you could just try renaming a bmp to .jpg
and then seeing how it loads... a buddy of mine running linux said that it acted like the thing was a bmp instead of a jpg

[fbartho.livejournal.com]

you're gonna have to tell me the names of some cool mac apps... :P

A good code editor for example
anything else that comes to mind

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

BBEdit, as my first choice for textediting. Then, check google for Surfer's Serials, or iSerials, as that might be useful when trying things out. I dunno... what do you plan on using it for, anyways?

[ibneko.livejournal.com]

Interesting. May try that someday.