Some Firewire Kung-Fu to Recover a Busted Mac

I'm actually not sure how well this will work with the latest generation of Apple products but it just worked like a charm between my G4 PowerBook and a G5 desktop box.

Evan ran into some trouble with a couple of QuickTime plugins (and who knew that QT plugins could halt an OS, that's a new one by me). This caused his system to get to the login prompt, and then essentially quit, almost like Finder was crashing again and again.

So before he went through the process of trying to recover in single user mode, we did the following to just delete the new plugins from his hard drive.

I grabbed my PowerBook and a Firewire cable and ran over to his desk.

Evan shut down his busted workstation.

I plugged my PowerBook into the Firewire port on the front of the G5.

I rebooted my PowerBook, holding down T so that it would boot up as a firewire drive.

Evan restarted his Desktop workstation, holding down Command-Option-Shift-Delete to bypass the built-in drive and boot from an external source (in this case the Firewire'd PowerBook).

From there the workstation booted, and displayed my login prompt so that I could get in and delete those files from the drive on his workstation. If we had needed to, we could have done lots of file-recovery magic, as well as emergency backups.

Wikipedia's OSX page.

Wikipedia's Firewire page.

Apple's keyboard shortcut page.

Alsoft's DiskWarrior, if all else fails.

Technorati Tags: apple, Firewire, macintosh, PowerBook