Adventures in tech support: iBook edition

Alternate title (and moral of the story): A good backup saves the day.

When I'm not gleefully blogging for TUAW in our secret, undisclosed location (Scott's livingroom), I'm working as the "Computer Guy" for a large, Mac-friendly company (yes, I'm essentially Nick Burns). On Sunday I received an urgent email regarding an iBook that would not boot. It held mission-critical files that would be needed on Monday (today). So, its owner dropped it off to me and I checked it out.

More after the jump...

"There's one minor detail I didn't tell you over the phone," she added. "It fell out of my jeep." Indeed, there was a nice, blacktop-colored scrape on one corner of the 'Book. If my years as an IT professional have taught me anything, it's that computers don't like falling onto hard parking lots. They're picky like that. Anyway, I hit the power button. I could hear the hard drive whirring, but the display was dark. I took the keyboard off just to see if there was any damage that would be immediately obvious. I noticed that the Airport card had been partially dislodged, at an angle that would be consistent with the impact it took. So, I figured, if this thing took a whack good enough to physically move the Airport card, it's safe to assume that some other internal connections may have become dislodged. There was no time for a full take-apart, so I moved on to Plan B.

Using the video adapter, I connected the iBook to a flat panel display I had on my workbench, put the machine to sleep (Command-Option-Eject for 2 seconds) and woke it back up. Nothing. Remember, there are lots of files on that machine that must be retrieved, and soon. In fact, this machine is scheduled to make Powerpoint presnetations all week. This calls for desperate measures. So, I first connected the forlorn iBook to a 400MHZ G4 I have with a firewire cable. Next, I connect the external HD that's used as the iBook's backup destination. Finally, I connect another iBook to the G4 via Firewire. Next I boot both iBooks in target disk mode on the G4.

Now it's time for SuperDuper! to do its magic. If you're unfamiliar, SuperDuper! is a utility that can make bootable clones of a machine's hard drive, and update them incrementally. So, I had SuperDuper! update the damaged iBook's backup drive with its internal volume's current state (which only took a few minutes, thanks to smart backups). Next, I told SuperDuper! to clone the now up-to-date external drive to the 2nd iBook's hard drive, which is just like physically moving the drive, but without all the mess. A short time later (all right, a long time, but I was at work, so it's OK), the working iBook had been turned into a mirror image of its damaged counterpart, all of the important files had been saved (the iBook is off presenting slides as I type this, in fact), the user experienced only an afternoon of turn around and today I can get to work on properly diagnosing the damaged iBook with a lot less pressure than I had on myself yesterday.

The moral of the story is this: Things happen. Back up your stuff. Go to your local geek store this weekend and buy an external hard drive. Because pavement isn't very forgiving.
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