Comment by mrlambchop | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrlambchop | Hacker News Reader

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After I stopped working this July, I collected as many old Mac's as I could from SF startups and refurbished them in my house, then distributed them to schools in the Bay Area who were most in need of IT equipment for their educators.

Backbreaking work and I am extremely sick of of MacOS recovery right now (and the 1000 tricks needed to get each laptop back to factory condition), but totally worth it. Just today a teacher from Fremont wrote in with a heart breaking email about how much a difference a 2015 Mac Pro made to his day and how better his online teaching is because of it. Got through around 200 devices in total including some iPads.

During my adventures distributing / collecting these laptops, I caught COVID - no good deed goes un-punished. I'm pretty sure there are at least 5k more Mac's sitting in companies IT closets from where they renewed equipment for employees but couldn't throw away the 3 thousand dollar device they bought 3 years prior - donating these is a tax break as well so the companies would be best to dispose of them than keep them around.

Thank you sir for your generosity! My wife teaches second grade in a lower income bay area school district, she's rocking a 2012 macbook pro :-( Let's put it this way, the fan is always on what with Zoom, multiple chrome tabs with google classroom and other apps, and an old ipad mini feeding quicktime to serve as a poor man's document camera.

Please send me a mail at hackernews@lamb-chop.co.uk and I'll hook your wife up with something more powerful. I've still got 20 laptops or so to distribute.

That is why I love Dell latitude laptops and precision desktops.

1. You can download the recovery USB drive from the dell website.

2. A recovery USB can be used to fix any number of dell machines as long as they shipped with the same OS. So what that means is that if I got 10 Windows-7 Dell laptops, I can fix them all with one USB drive.

3. There is no need to mess with Windows keys as they are embedded in the BIOS.

> I am extremely sick of of MacOS recovery right now

What issues did you encounter? Shouldn't recreating the disk with Disk Utility remove all traces of the old MacOS install, or did you encounter issues with Find My Mac?

Shared404 nailed one of the issues. I think the top three problems from a time sink perspective were:

- unlocking the laptop (knowing an existing password, Apple ID or firmware password). Probably 3 in 10 laptops are non-trivial. I have 5 laptops with unknown firmware passwords that I am planning on removing the SPI flash on to wipe out the password (just for funsies... seems like an interesting challenge!)

- upgrading to Catalina via USB installation image. If the OS image is jumping several versions (or actually being downgraded from a security patch release), here be dragons. Typically the USB installer pulls down another installer via Wi-Fi and then has to perform a random "this disk needs an upgrade" routine which 50% of the time results in bad thing happening and I'd be left with the flashing question mark. Then its time to start over again.

- After installing and setting up Catalina (so I can smoke test the functionality), I'd wipe the disk and reinstall from USB one last time so it was fresh. Randomly, the re-install would fail in a mysterious way and I'd have to go around a third time.

> - upgrading to Catalina via USB installation image. If the OS image is jumping several versions (or actually being downgraded from a security patch release), here be dragons. Typically the USB installer pulls down another installer via Wi-Fi and then has to perform a random "this disk needs an upgrade" routine which 50% of the time results in bad thing happening and I'd be left with the flashing question mark. Then its time to start over again.

Weird. I had the opposite problem.

Mid 2012 Macbook, couldn't get El Capitan to install at all, but installing directly to Catalina from the USB worked first try.

Depending on the age of the macbook there can be several issues.

One I encounter a lot is that if the recovery mode wants to install El Capitan, it can't unless you change the date in terminal, and then fight the internet/installation to get the install done before NTP screws it up.

Knowing that, could you block NTP (port 123) to the network segment / address pool leased to the laptops at a router level and work around the issue? You might even be able to define an DHCP address range for only apple devices.

Probably. I wound up just making a bootable usb installer and that fixed it.

It's not a particularly hard problem to work around, just an example of something that can pop up while in mac's recovery mode.

very thoughtful, god bless you

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