[geeks] Macbook probably KIA, now what?

[Jonathan J. M. Katz]

On Sun, May 17, 2009 at 3:39 PM, William Barnett-Lewis
<wlewisiii at gmail.com>wrote:

> Oh, joy. My 7 year old just dumped a nearly full coke on top of my
> Macbook. I've got all the bits opened up and have been drying it with
> them take the 2 & 1 gb sticks from my Macbook (1st gen core2 dual) or



> the 300gb sata drive I just put into it? I haven't look at them much
> at all as I'd hoped to get several more years out of my Macbook &
> can't really afford new right now anyway...


As long as the HD is intact and running this becomes pretty easy.

First, dry it out and give it a shot. my daughter decided my MacBook, also a
1st gen (core duo, not a core 2 duo) was thirsty for strawberry milk. I was
lucky, and only needed to replace the keyboard. Given that it was a black
macbook and all I could find on e-bay were white keyboards, I now have an
oreo macbook. Kinda cool.

If the system is indeed dead, you need a new home for your 300GB SATA drive.
You should be able to continue to use that drive in another system. Abuse
the HCL and forums at http://www.osx86project.org to find a recent vintage
system that takes SATA drives that works well as a hackintosh. From there,
you'll probably need to install the HD, boot Linux from a CD (some
perversion of Linux that speaks HFS+) and install a few drivers. The one
you'll need is one that fakes out the kernel and puts in a fake EFI layer. I
forget the details, but once you have that, you should be in good shape.