
Ask HN: My tools broke, and I am broke, what now? - speeder
I am from Brazil, that is having a economic hard time right now, also I don&#x27;t have a regular income for almost an year (and my last real job was many years ago).<p>I got some small freelancing work to do, I was going to deliver a milestone tomorrow, I was using my startup old workstation that was left on my house (after the startup ran out of rent money) to work on that, but the HDD failed about one hour and a half ago, and the diagnostic tools that come with OSX say that it is impossible to salvage.<p>I am broke, almost literally, in Brazil you cannot ask for bankruptcy as individual, if I could I would ask, I am in debt, have no income and I am struggling to pay rent and food.<p>And the work I had to do requires an OSX, I also own a laptop in its last throes (several parts of it already failed or are randomly working only sometimes) but it is one of those that came with a stupid bios locked to Windows 8, I tried very hard to install Linux on it and failed, I doubt I can install OSX (Hackintosh) on it.<p>Also my personal health is failing too and interfering with my work.<p>I am very, very unsure of what to do now... I feel like if I was cornered and physically threatened, if I fail to deliver tomorrow probably the contract will be cancelled (my health already me deliver some earlier milestones late and the client is already upset with me), but even if I DO deliver this milestone and the next ones, the payment won&#x27;t be enough to repay my most urgent debts (like late rent payments) and replace the failing laptop, much less an OSX machine (beside being already expensive in US, in Brazil they are outrageously expensive, because of excessive taxation and currently unfavourable currency exchange rate)
======
hncomment
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.

~~~
speeder
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...)

------
meira
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.

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

------
polquaser
If you can get your laptop functioning to complete your milestone, maybe you
can try this: [http://www.macincloud.com/](http://www.macincloud.com/)

------
LarryMade2
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.

------
k3oni
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.

~~~
zyxley
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.

------
segmondy
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.

------
thaumaturgy
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).

~~~
speeder
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.

~~~
thaumaturgy
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.

~~~
speeder
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.

~~~
thaumaturgy
Post #5 in [http://www.linux.org/threads/mac-linux-usb-
loader.3579/](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.

------
27182818284
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.

------
hobarrera
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?

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

~~~
speeder
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)

~~~
matiasb
Are you able to start a donation campaign?

~~~
mirimir
I saw [http://www.gofundme.com/](http://www.gofundme.com/) in a recent thread.

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

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

~~~
speeder
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)

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

~~~
speeder
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 :/

------
matiasb
Move to Paraguay!

~~~
hwf829
is paraguay doing better, economically?

~~~
matiasb
[http://en.mercopress.com/2014/07/14/paraguay-s-currency-
stea...](http://en.mercopress.com/2014/07/14/paraguay-s-currency-steadily-
becoming-a-strong-currency-based-on-positive-indicators)

