Earned my geek badge last weekend

A friend has passed on a Mac G4 to me, from a friend of hers who just wants someone to figure out its booting problems and get her email off of it. I let it sit in my living room for months and finally got it together last weekend to hook up my monitor and a borrowed keyboard and the piece of crap puck mouse that came with my G3 to check it out.

It would start to boot (OS 8.something!), then stop. I managed to get the CD drive drawer to come out (not easily!) and got my OS 9 CD in there. It started to boot under OS 9, and then stopped, about the same place. Hm. The disk that was in the drive was marked "DW 9," which I assumed was DiskWarrior. Interesting clue. I opened it up (love that side-opening thing in these machines!), used my compressed air to blow out lots of dust, and then my sights settled on the memory.

Hey, my mind said. Sometimes memory can be bad and cause all sorts of problems. So I popped out the leftmost chip, closed it up, and... Voila! It booted up just fine.

So, now to get the data off. There was a copy of Roxio Toast on it, but to my disappointment, the CD drive was not a CD-R. I hooked up my firewire CD-R drive, pushed the button to turn it on, and it went in and stayed in, not feeling right at all. Ugh.

Since this was a drive I'd assembled (Other World Computing sold them as CD drives and enclosures and DIY directions for putting them together), I was pretty comfortable taking it apart again. 5 screws later, I found that one of the plastic tabs holding the on button in place had broken.

Would you believe I couldn't find a drop of Super Glue in my entire house? I still don't know how that's possible. So here I am in my pjs, wanting to just finish this thing, and no Super Glue.

Finally, ping! I remember that we have a bottle of New Skin. This is a band-aid-less bandage thing that I used on a cut of Graham's a while back. I had confirmed when I bought it that it was just Super Glue, really (cyanoacrylate glue)--perhaps a sterile version of it.

I painted it onto the part, put it all back together, and yeah! It worked just fine. Hah!