An answer to the quiz

There were a couple of people who were close, but no one hit it on the nose, so here is what I did:

First you snag the firewire cable from the iSight and connect one end to the broken drive lappy, and the other end to the not-so-broken drive lappy.  Then you restart the broken drive lappy in firewire target disk mode; once the HD of broken lappy pops up on no-so-broken lappy you launch System Prefs and use the Startup Disk chooser to choose the HD loaded via firewire.  You then reboot the no-so-broken lappy and that’s it.

Once the not-so-broken lappy boots, it will pick up where the install left off, in this case asking for disk 2 of the install media.  There you have it.  Oh and for the questions regarding my sanity for deploying a machine with a dead CD-ROM, that machine would be running an Excel spreadsheet, and nothing else.  Didn’t need a CD-ROM for that.

  1. personal avatar Nick Barrett
    Stroll on over and visit Nick Barrett
    March 1, 2007

    Hi, this is completely off subject but I can’t get your search to work currently, I was just wondering, how do you and Shawn (Sporadic Nonsense) get your recent comments to look like they do, they look so much better than my Brians Latest Comments, how do you do it?

  2. personal avatar Steven
    Stroll on over and visit Steven
    March 1, 2007

    Fixing hardware can be a very exciting experience!

  3. personal avatar luxuryluke
    Stroll on over and visit luxuryluke
    March 1, 2007

    Very nice solution. Interesting that an incomplete install would actually boot, and complete the install.
    Great tip!

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