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 The Geek Culture Forums
 The Joy of Tech
 So there I was... (A personal experience with the Mac face)
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| Author | Topic: So there I was... (A personal experience with the Mac face) |
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RedHatDude Geek Larva  
Posts: 28 |
posted August 14, 2002 08:52
   
I was about 13 years old, my family had a Performa 550 (with CDROM!!! Multimedia was all the craze then.), and I was playing on the Mac (probably Sim City), when all of a sudden, I need to reboot the computer. It looked like a normal reboot at first, but then, the X-eyed mac face was staring at me, sad and lonely. I rebooted again, nothing. Panic started to creep in, and I thought for sure I had broken the machine. Trying to keep my cool, I began to diagnose the problem. Finally, after many tense minutes, I thought I might try to eject the disk that is in the drive, but alas, no eject button! Then I noticed manual-override pinhole below the slot, and retrieved a paperclip, ejected the disk, and rebooted. It worked! The computer booted, and I was clearly off the hook for turning the mac face sad. I have no idea why that disk in the drive caused that (usually it ejects an unbootable disk), maybe it was stuck, but now I keep a paperclip on my desk as a reminder... and so that I can push the reset button on my PC that's 2 microns wide, and inset in the case so that ET himself couldn't push it with his long small boney fingers! IP: Logged |
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MacGenius Super Geek  
Posts: 164 |
posted August 14, 2002 19:49
That happened to me once too, two years ago. I was only 10 years old and I had recieved a Macintosh Portable (backlit, now a relic). It was a fine machine, so long as you didn't try to "take it with you". Anyhow, I was backing up my work onto some floppy disks and I left one in the drive. When I booted, I got the Sad Mac. (Probably the only time I ever got a sad Mac, cause all my Mac's hardware was in fine condition, only a few crashed HD's (A Quantum 120M and a Seagate 2GB that I brought back to life*). Anyhow, I got that awful feeling I can't describe I get evry time one of my Macs gets a problem. I presses reset, and the floppy popped out and it worked just fine. One interesting thing worth mentioning: I was working on my LC III and decided to switch input devices. So I shut down the computer (it was ADB, remember) and plugged in the new mouse. I left the monitor on, of course, so I wouldn't have to bother switching it on again. I tuned on the Mac and it didn't even stir. I switched it off, then switched off the monitor and then switched it back on again. Next I turned the computer on and BAM! No problem at all!!! (*Once I got a Sad Mac on my 128K, it was a misaligned floppy cable and a misaligned analog board.) IP: Logged |
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- - e r i k - - Newbie 
Posts: 8 |
posted August 15, 2002 03:05
You can get a sad mac (harmless) by holding the programmers button (the indented one beside the reset button) at Startup. You also get the "chimes of death", tones which actually means something based on the melody they play. If that isn't a cool diagnostic tool nothing is. IP: Logged |
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dragon34 Geek
Posts: 60 |
posted August 15, 2002 03:22
Well this isn't really a sad mac story.. but it is pretty funny.. One of my friends had a 7100 with a dying hard drive, He had pretty much given up hope on it and was hoping to just get some of the data off of it (it wouldn't boot). I went to visit him with my copy of tech tool pro and we went to work trying to fix it (watching it try to boot os9 off a cd was funny in itself). 10 minutes later or something it had booted and we copied all relevant data to an external drive. after we had finished copying we were running the tech tool diagnostics on the hard drive and the computer crashed.. so we hit the little reset button in the front, and (because it was about 3am at this point) we accidently held down the debug reset while it was rebooting (lack of coordination at such a ridiculous hour combined with holding the reset button with a chopstick or something (no I dont' know why)). *sound of car crashing* We were a bit confused.. looked at eachother and went... "was that the computer??!!!" so of course we did it again.. and again... and again (after all *everything* is hilarious at 3am) We were laughing hysterically for several minutes, and he decided he was going to keep the dying 7100 around, just because it could do that. Of course i don't think I'd *really* want to do that with a computer that wasn't already toasted... but I have a few  I've never seen another mac do that, but then I've never really tried... I should try it with my old 68k performa....
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nekomatic Assimilated
Posts: 456 |
posted August 15, 2002 04:48
I keep a paperclip stuck to the front of my work PC's with Blu-tak for ready availability when that reset button needs pushing... IP: Logged |
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ilovemydualg4 Highlie 
Posts: 756 |
posted August 15, 2002 14:34
hehe... i figured that one out by accident on my imac... they had brand new imacs at school, and the sysadmin had played a practical joke on me.... i pulled it on one of the imacs.... i kept resetting it for him since i had the clip in my hand, and i kept hitting the prog button. we moved on down the row and he almost had a heart attack thinking that their 30 new imacs were all defective.
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