Date: Fri, 30 Jan 1998 02:10:50 -0000
From: EvangeList <evangelist@apple.com>
Subject: Tidbit - Recovering "Dead" Macs

Keyword: Advocacy, Why Macs Are Better

This tidbit is from:

Michael LaMorte

I work at a prepress shop in Columbus, Ohio, as a Photoshop operator 
first, and as The Mac Doctor second. The other week at work, there was a 
brief but total power outage. All of the machines were fine except one... 
a UMAX C500.

Upon startup, the poor thing would just sit there, flashing a question 
mark in a floppy on the screen. So we boot from CD and the Mac gives us 
an error -127, and the hard drive won't even mount. We look up the error 
code in Chiron v2.4 (an excellent freeware information resource - highly 
recommended) and find out that it's an "internal file system error." One 
of the few Windows guys starts cackling about how bad Macs suck and that 
a Windows machine wouldn't have done the same thing. Meanwhile, the 
machine's primary user was afraid that we'd have to completely wipe the 
drive, reinstall all the software, and get everything tweaked back to 
where she had it. (Luckily, all important files were backed up on the 
server's mag-tape unit. We just didn't want to have to go through a 
lengthy process of re-installing about a dozen apps, then tweak all the 
preferences back to where they were.) We would like to run diagnostics, 
but we can't mount a Zip drive when booting from CD since the Iomega 
extention doesn't load...

So I find a machine with a Zip drive that's not doing anything, and an 
empty Zip disk. I pop the UMAX's boot CD in and copy the System Folder 
over to the Zip, along with a few diagnostics utilities. Unplug the Zip, 
attach it to the UMAX machine. Power-on and hold down 
command-shift-option-delete to boot from the SCSI chain. The UMAX sees 
the good System folder on the Zip and boots normally. I run MacTools Pro 
4.0 on the "dead" hard drive, and find that the entire directory 
structure is corrupted. I click "fix", and let it go to work. Not long 
later, MacTools Pro is done, the UMAX's hard drive is mounted, and 
everything is fine.

Elapsed time? 45 minutes. I spent another hour performing routine 
maintenance like defragging the hard drive, and the UMAX went back into 
service 2 hours after the power outage.

What ever happened to the Windows user? Well, turns out his machine at 
home was receiving a fax at the time of the power outage. Two weeks and 
three re-installs of Win95 later, he's STILL repairing the damage. What 
comes around goes around, I guess. :)