Ask HN: My tools broke, and I am broke, what now?

Many have made practical, technical recommendations about your computer issues.

But it sounds like stress/panic may be the real issue. (Your concerns and plans are all-over-the-map.)

You should seek someone local and friendly to talk to. They will be better at assessing the whole situation and providing a calm outside perspective. Ideally, this would also be someone who could provide a couch to crash on, if your current rent/residence proves financially unsustainable.

Your health and sanity are your "most urgent debts". Nothing else matters if those aren't in place. You may have to delay or step away from the kind of solo-contracting that's led you to a stressful situation. Taking simpler work, in a larger or more-traditional team/project, may help restore a more balanced outlook.

Good luck. You can survive a lot, if you take things logically, one-at-a-time.

I found a psichologist willing to help me for free until I can pay her (for "free" in the sense she is taking notes of the sessions to charge me later)

Unfortunately I have no close friends, and all my aquaintances are in similar positions, sometimes worse (the closes "Friend" I have right now, has the same problems as me, plus is married and have a kid, and his wife is also unemployed)

Also I am doing solo freelancing because is the only thing I could find to have any income, I am sending resumes for years now, without any success.

EDIT: I am also suspecting my main issue is psychiatric (I think I may have a real case of ADHD), but the psychiatrists I went so far were all obviously bad (For example one talked non-stop, don't allowed me to tell him my symptoms, and then told me I had some anxiety disease...)

Hey man, I'm Brazilian too, had a startup recently, everything went wrong and I got broke. And survived, so if you wanna talk drop a message: alanmeira@gmail.com

good luck!

And Brazil is having an economic hard time just like every other country in the world.

PS: I have an old MacBook Pro here, if you want, I can lend it to you.

People are really awesome ! :-) If all of us would be like you the world would be a better place.

If you can get your laptop functioning to complete your milestone, maybe you can try this: http://www.macincloud.com/

So you have a second hdd and can boot from that then?

Not sure about the state of your failed drive... If you can see the file system with your working one that's one thing (see what to copy farther below), if it's unreadable right off then you need to have some emergency thing.

For repair disk you could create a bootable linux rescue disk image on a USB flash drive and if its big enough you can store your salvaged programs (one Ive used is System Rescue CD, has tools built in. - note rescue is technical if you aren’t familiar with the commands through the terminal and Mac file system best to have someone who knows what they are doing do this...) Once you got the bootable image you restart your computer with the option key to get the boot selector to select the usb image and boot. (if the mac was OS 10.6.4+ should boot a Linux USB image fine; prior to that Macs didn't have the firmware update for that supports other bootloaders)

Now for recovering your applications, get the needed stuff in applications folder, and related preference and extension files in your user/library and system/library and also preferences for both folders - dig around a little there may be multiple places for stuff to have been installed. (put the files in the same relative places on your other system will usually do the trick, if you get an error, it will probably tell you what you missed.)

Well this is incomplete - but something to get you started - if you can read the files off your crashed drive you have a good chance of getting most of your stuff off it. Good Luck.

As you have a working laptop running Windows 8 i would install Virtualbox and load a VM with OSx(Hackintosh). Will work fine, albeit maybe a bit slower.

If doing this, stick to 10.9 if possible. 10.10 changes up the graphics stuff in a way that breaks VM graphics acceleration and makes the UI unpleasantly slow.

Can't help you with anything, but for the future.

1) Network, it's good to have friends. I'm sure there's an "apple" Scene, if you had a friend or two, you could use their hardware.

2) Use cheap hardware, PC/Linux.

3) Save to be able to handle emergencies and to have a backup machine.

There is a Linux tool called "safecopy" that can often recover data from failing hard drives. If you can boot a live Linux CD you should be able to download safecopy and run it against your hard drive. Be VERY careful about the command line options, if you get the source and destination parameters backwards you'll destroy any hope of getting data back from your HD.

I think I've got an older Mac mini here in the shop that we use occasionally for jobs that require Mac-specific things. If you can get a working internet connection and want to try, I'll get it hooked up and see if I can give you remote access to it. If you want to do that, send me an email (link is in my username profile).

I liked that idea.

Now I am wondering how to boot Linux on a Mac... I found a wonderful tool named "Mac Linux USB Loader" to create a Linux bootable with USB, but that tool is OSX only (since my OSX don't boot at all... it does not help).

Oh, and the Mac don't have a CD reader.

Booting Linux on your Mac won't help. Safecopy doesn't repair the data on your drive, it just copies data from one drive to another drive -- but it does so very carefully, going back and re-reading bad sectors and narrowing down the amount of unreadable data.

You'd need a second computer with extra drive space greater than or equal to the entire size of the hard drive in your Mac.

I think you've gotta find some local help with this. It's tough to do much about it from here with less than a day before your work is due.

My idea is boot the mac, copy the code, and then edit it using the cloud mac thing suggested in another reply here in the thread...

I am not sure if it will work, but so far is the best idea.

Post #5 in http://www.linux.org/threads/mac-linux-usb-loader.3579/ looks like it has instructions that might work for setting up the USB drive without a booting Mac.

ddrescue is the tool I've used to do this sort of work. I don't know how it compares to safecopy, but it's quite good. It'll do dd of varying speeds/block sizes to recover what it can and will approach bad blocks from both 'sides' to eck out every bit (literally) of data that it can. It'll also remember where it's scanned, where it's failed and can resume if you stop it (so long as you set a logfile - ALWAYS set a logfile!)

Again, not sure if this will help but it's another option there.

Explain to the client what happened, be honest, and try to be as helpful as possible.

Looking at your LinkedIn history, it looks like you've worked at several places before. Go back to one, connect with folks you know there, and rebuild things for a while.

Can you put the hard drive from the extra laptop inside the Mac?

If so, grab your code (as already discussed on other comments), and put that disk in the mac. Boot with command+r pressed, and you'll be able to install OS X onto the new drive.

Slightly off-topic: Since you specifically need OS X, Do you do iOS development?

How hard would it be to send you a laptop with you being located in Brazil?

It depends.

If the government think it is a gift, it mostly works, but otherwise they will charge crazy taxes and be annoying to allow it to be delivered (thus the reason why stuff here is expensive, and why my startup had to pay a smuggler to get the now-broken Mac machine)

Are you able to start a donation campaign?

I saw http://www.gofundme.com/ in a recent thread.

Also, OP could put a Bitcoin address in his profile.

It's time to get a regular job for some stability? (finance, health)

I am trying this for years.

I don't have a job for years because I could not find any. (not for lack of trying, I sent thousands of resumes, but went in total for about 10 interviews during my whole life)

Probably not worth it now, but you know how to disable secure boot etc right?

I tried when the laptop was new (I wanted to install Fedora with USB) but even finding tutorials specific to my bios, there was options outright missing of the screen :/

Move to Paraguay!

is paraguay doing better, economically?

http://en.mercopress.com/2014/07/14/paraguay-s-currency-stea...

Nope! Paraguay suffered a coup d'etat recently and is struggling with a corrupt president. The current president is responsible for half of Brazilian cigarrete smuggling. And almost all marijuana consumed in Brazil comes from Paraguay.