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[Geek_of_HeathMount]

Hi all,

I have recently discovered that I have a mac breaker in my mists. So far they have managed to render 2 macs completely useless. So any help on the following would be much appreciated.

 

Victim no.1

imac 700Mhz/128MB/40HD

 

Victim no.2

mac mini 1.42GB/512MB/80HD

 

Both will no longer boot up regardless of what key combinations I use. The only thing they now do is display either:-

 

the folder with a question mark / happy face

or

two folders one with an arrow facing right and the other with a reload arrow

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

[mossj]

i don't have any experience with any of them ^_^

 

but the last time I looked at a mac that was hanging it was because it thought something was in the cd drive.

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

first thing i checked, but hey are empty

[Guest theeldergeek]

Hi all,

I have recently discovered that I have a mac breaker in my mists. So far they have managed to render 2 macs completely useless. So any help on the following would be much appreciated.

 

Victim no.1

imac 700Mhz/128MB/40HD

 

Victim no.2

mac mini 1.42GB/512MB/80HD

 

Both will no longer boot up regardless of what key combinations I use. The only thing they now do is display either:-

 

the folder with a question mark / happy face

or

two folders one with an arrow facing right and the other with a reload arrow

 

Any help greatly appreciated.

 

Have they bought in their own Mac's, firewire'd them together, started the 'broken' Mac's in target mode, and wiped the drives when they appeared on the desktop as firewire drives?

 

..

Edited February 23, 2010 by theeldergeek

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

Not sure, the damage was done overnight. So it could be the boarders or could even be a teacher.

 

Will check to see if they pop up as firewire drives on another mac

[Robbocop]

Here's a bi of help which might come in handy. ?The technical doc about how to do the target mode bit is here How to use and troubleshoot FireWire target disk mode Start the good Mac in target mode, and then the broken one holding down ALT to make it show available OS volumes.

and to prevent this kind of tampering in future you might want to password protect the firmware on the Macs, which you can read about here Setting up firmware password protection in Mac OS X Have a really good look at that first though to make sure you understand the implications. It's great extra security, but of course is intended to make some jobs more difficult! Hope that helps you.

[Geek_of_HeathMount]

thanks for that. I'll do some further digging on the troubleshooting the Fire-wire link