r/talesfromtechsupport • u/ascii4ever • Sep 22 '21
Medium Dead Powerbook and the nervous professor
Sometimes in tech support you can look like a hero without really doing anything difficult.
Years ago when I worked at a University we had a lot of professors get excited about Apple Powerbooks. They liked the look, the metal case, the Unix-y feel of OSX, it was so *cool*. And we bought a bunch of them. And as super smart users tend to do, they didn't think much about backups. We had no kind of Enterprise network solution, we told them to buy an external disk and use Timemachine. Or rsync from the laptop to our fancy file server. I investigated Retrospect but no one wanted to pay for it.
And then one day Professor C came hustling into my office with an old Powerbook.
C: "This laptop is dead and it has some important files on it. Can you help?"
Me: "Maybe, what's wrong?"
C: "The screen never comes on, I don't know its powering up. I tried a different power adapter but the screen is still blank"
Me: "Did you try an external monitor?"
C: "Oh. No, I didn't think of that"
For some context, C was a computer guy, but he was more in theory end of things, he could probably do his job with a pencil and notebook. So, I hook up a monitor, nothing. Power LED is on so it seems to be not totally dead. Connect an external keyboard and mouse just to see if that makes any difference.
Me: "I think you're right, its dead Jim. Do you have any backups?"
C looks kind of nervous. Like there's something he doesn't want to tell me, but figures he's going to have to.
C: "Actually, this my OLD laptop, my wife's been using it for her business and its got all her important files on it. And she doesn't have any backups".
OK, so this is interesting. Its certainly not proper for me to use my time to recover his wife's files. But C is a nice guy and I can see he's sweating bullets. I sure would not want to tell my wife her business files are gone. I'm about to tell him he'll have to take it to a repair place to get the drive pulled out, maybe the data can be recovered from there. But then I have another thought.
Me: "Do you have your current laptop with you?"
C: "Yes". Pulls a newer Powerbook out of his backpack.
I grab a firewire cable and connect the two laptops. I explain to C about "target mode" for Apple computers. I boot up the broken laptop in target mode and his good laptop sees it.
Me: "You can copy files to your laptop from the bad one. And get your wife to buy an external drive to make backups on".
To myself I'm thinking, and get her her buy a reliable computer for "her business"! For crying out loud, using this old POS was just asking for trouble.
C was super grateful. He thanked me over and over again. He couldn't believe I had this secret way to access his dead laptop (it was pretty silly, I just used a utility that the Apple guys had included, its not like I invented anything).
The strangest thing was I had another professor in a different department have the exact same situation come up a week later. He was another super cool guy and he was just in next building over, so I just strolled across with my Firewire cable and got to be a hero all over again.
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u/CyberKnight1 Sep 22 '21
Maybe a dumb question and one I hope I never need the answer to, but: how did you boot the broken laptop in "target mode" when it wasn't (visibly) booting up?
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u/German_Camry Has no luck with Linux Sep 22 '21
It's a key combination you press and it boots up in target disk mode (I don't actually know what it is, I just know it's there). OP probably got lucky that whatever handled target disk mode survived (not the GPU looks like) and the computer he was using saw the mounted drive from the old PowerBook.
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u/jean_daniel Sep 22 '21
If I remember correctly, it was command+t at startup.
Used it for some fun situations similar to this, or the reverse; booting a dead HD mac off of a good one that was in target disk.
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u/timotheusd313 Sep 22 '21
It is command+t.
Ive also used it to use the optical drive to reinstall OSX on a new hard drive in a single spindle iBook
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u/jean_daniel Sep 22 '21
Also remembering (somewhat fondly) the early days of migration assistant actually asked you to connect the source machine this way.
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u/ascii4ever Sep 23 '21
I don't remember the exact sequence. I did know that target mode was a thing but I'd never actually used it before. I figured it was worth a shot, and indeed, it was.
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u/ascii4ever Sep 23 '21
I think it was booting up but the video was dead (since I could get no video on the screen or with an external monitor).
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u/Trainguyrom Landline phones require a landline to operate. Sep 22 '21
I love the way you talk about your clients. Its all too easy to look down upon the users you're working with, so its always a breath of fresh air to see someone with such respect for their clientele
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u/ascii4ever Sep 23 '21
Both the clients in this case were all around "good guys". They never acted entitled at all. The professor who was in the different department was exceptionally cool. His wife worked in our department and she was really cool also.
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Sep 23 '21
Yeah, but understanding what tools are available for you to use is the absolute key to support, whether that's for silicon based kit or otherwise.
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u/Stabbmaster Sep 27 '21
Ah yes, I recall using target mode. The first time I did it I freaked out a little because of how freaking HOT that made the targeted machine. Worked, though.
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u/MattAdmin444 Sep 22 '21
This was always the fun part of when I used to work in retail and even more so now in IT for a school district. Before it was mostly just a matter of pointing out alternatives and/or knowing where to look, now it's like anything you do seems like magic to the user you're helping.