I'm a high school student and am a district tech for my school. Some kid plugged a bluetooth speaker into a school computer to charge (why the teacher let him I'm not sure), and the cord supposedly charging the speaker via usb was actually destroying the computer. When it had attacked it the whole Mac's screen turned blue, there was no text or anything. He denied doing it and then plugged it to another computer and of course it did the same thing. The teacher wants me to fix the two mac's but whenever you turn them on theres just a blank blue screen and it wont boot into OSX. I'm stumped... Do I need to re install or is there some way to get rid of this with a cd or program or should they just be thrown away...? I'd like to have a solution for my teacher on Monday... Thanks.
wow, you're the district tech and your best idea is to throw them away? lol
doesn't make too much sense, all i can imagine is the cord/speaker was shorted and fried a usb port or maybe even the bus, i wouldn't expect this to damage the computer too badly, but perhaps the way the logicboard is made it made it's way to something important
most usb have a failsafe that shuts the computer down when it detects a short.
ask me how i know haha
seems to me more like some sort of preventive attack measure. maybe those mac's had a program that shuts down and locks the computer when it detects a unauthorized usb device?
try this if you haven't
I suppose this is your problem
comment: "Press the shift right by start-up"
Greetings
JS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLbbJlI4HbQ&hd=1&html5=1
Wow thanks for the quick responses! I believe it or not was not planning on throwing them away, but added it as an option to complete a series! I will attempt to sound nice and disregard your rude comment Anarekist. Kai, he is being punished. I don't have access to the computers today but I will on Monday so I will try the safe mode thing. I'm a PC guy so when they come to me with mac problems I'm a bit stumped. Maybe they should just fire me. Thanks for the solutions guys! If anyone suspects they have a different answer please feel free to share.
you might want to look inside those speakers they might not even be speakers just a speaker case with a virus on a hdd or ssd in it
They are speakers! They were tested, but it happened to two computers so we suspect the usb cord wasn't a charging cord. But that's, beside the point. The kid is dealt with and I will hopefully be able tu fix the computers on Monday
Worst comes to worst, reinstall OSX. It will probably take a while since you'd have to get the software back on as well but if you can't get into the OS then you'll just have to reinstall it since this doesn't seem to be a hardware issue.
So you are the school tech and you didn't clone another Mac OS install?
I mean seriously, I may not have experience on anything past 10.6 but when I was running Macs all you had to do was clone the drive of another Mac over using something like CarbonCopyCloner as this made fully functional, bootable clones of any OS X install. Also since there was no copy protection or serials it just didn't care that I would set up one Mac then clone it's install on a dozen others as it was just so much faster then reinstalling from scratch.
Also, I'm not sure how pluging in a speaker system would damage a ac, generally OS X is pretty forgiving and Apple usually has drivers installed for pretty much everything under the sun as part of the OS much the same way Linux does it. If there was something hardware wise wrong with the speakers it should have just caused a Kernel Panic at the worst, which is the OS X/Linux/BSD version of a BSOD in which case hold the power button to hard reset.
Here's the thing... The speaker and whether or not the cord was actually a charging cord is not the issue! The post is about fixing the computers. As for the computers, I haven't touched them yet... It happened at the end of the day, and I won't be able to touch them until Monday, so I was just trying to think things over so I knew what to try!
And they were hard reset. Same screen.
In my experience the kids that grew up only ever using Windows end up having to constantly ask for help with the most trivial tasks as they only ever learned the one way of doing things and as such usually end up totally lost when something has been moved or renamed.
I dunno if it's still the case, but for the longest time Office on Mac was far less of a PITA then Office on Windows. That and Macs have always been easier to maintain then Windows systems. Ending up being cheaper for the school district in the long run by needing fewer techs to maintain them. Usually only having to deal with hardware failure and vandalism, I.E. gum pushed into drives and ports by some little douche bag.
I grew up with DOS, Windows1.0, AppleOS, Mac OS and Amiga OS an as such never needed to ask for help unless it was a completely new type of software like Photoshop or Pro Tools
2 weeks suspension?
You mean 2 weeks vacation, also, he doesn't learn during that time, maybe just give him Saturday School for a month, that'll straightin' things out
^ much better sounding.
Though this assumes the child had malicious intent. If he was simply plugging a cable into a computer, then it could easily have just been a mistake.
As it is a child at school, I'd suggest removing his name from your post. People can get finicky when you identify them.
i feel both options are absurd in education. they need less funcionality. web and word. so firefox and librewriter. bam problem solved, use linux. save some money and put that towards things that are valuable like music or vocational classes. oh wait the money they save on the licensing fees (that would no longer need paid) would get sent to the football team. well worth a try.
Macs have always been able to run Linux and any comp class using Macs should also teach the basics of the terminal, EMacs and Darwinports etc. You'd be surprised how much Linus software runs right on top of OS X due to it's DarwinBSD core.
While it's possible to built an OSx86 Frankenmac it's a legal gray area for the schools to do so, they'd be better served by buying macs and tri-booting Windows and Linux.
it could be that the macs have a crappy psu installed or speakers use a bad driver. ether way It sounds more like your school was sold some defective mac's and should probably send them back to apple if the warranty is still good.
before you try sending it back you could try booting it in safe mode by holding the shift key at start-up. if you could boot it that way then and see if you can fix it by removing any newly installed drivers.
then again if you have a spare flash drive you may want to try this recovery tool : http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1433