Time for a story. Kind of a geeky story, but here goes.
So, we’re 100% committed to the “reuse, repair, recycle…” etc thing, and one of the things we’ve been wrestling with is computers. First there was this sweet 27″ iMac that suddenly wouldn’t power up. We tested it, and put in a new power supply, and no luck. It’s probably the logic board, and that’s too much of a repair to tackle at the moment. We pulled the drive out and migrated it to the MacBook Air that’s driving the Epson printer, and we figured we’d put the drive back in the iMac when we got a board.
In the meantime, we got about 5 older Mac towers donated. We went through them, and 4 of them are G5s – too old to bother with, so we’re going to scavenge the cases for parts, maybe build a Hackintosh or something. We even have an idea to use a case to build a filter for the laser cutter. The other one looked like a Mac Pro – newer, Intel processor. We pulled that out and fired it up. The hard drive was junk.
There it sat, on the pile, until things slowed down to a dull roar and we could think about it again. We tried a new drive, and burning a Snow Leopard install disk. No luck. We tried all sorts of things to get a new drive in there with an operating system that would work. Foiled at every turn. You know that drive we pulled out of the iMac? Well that now wouldn’t boot up either.
Then, reading up again, there was this thing – “Restore” – in Disk Utility. We started making a “Restore” disk of the old Macbook Pro that’s the daily drive around here. That’s a sketchy proposition, because all the little drivers and stuff in the OS on a disk is usually pretty keyed in to the box it’s running. A Macbook Pro OS might not be too happy running a big Intel Mac Pro.
Mind you, we hadn’t even really confirmed this machine was, in fact, an Intel Mac Pro.
We look at it again. We go look at our work tower, a Mac Pro. We look at the salvage box. We get a thought.
Why not build a “Restore” disk from the Mac Pro Intel work tower, the one that has the complete Adobe Creative Suite, a bunch of other handy apps, and looks like a pretty similar machine?
Well, we did it, and couldn’t hardly wait to run back to the Brickyard with our drive and see if it would boot up the Mac Pro. We plugged it in, and BAM! Booted up like nobody’s business! After running some diagnostics and tune-ups, the new/old Mac Pro is running like a dream.
The funny part… once we got it up and running, we checked it out (“About My Computer”). It’s EXACTLY the same machine as our work tower – same 8GB of RAM and everything.
Sometimes you win one!
Keep making fixing stuff. Take care of people, play nice and clean up after yourselves.
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