Urgent - pb broke down, need it back

[Ja Di ksw]

Hi all, this is for my friend who (from the US) is now stuck in Austria. She left her 2 or 3 week old pb (she does have Apple care) on screen saver, and left for a few hours. When she came back, the screen was just different colored pinstripes. It won't even turn on unless its plugged into the wall, even though the batteries are both ok. She has to get in there because she needs the contacts for her study abroad and internet access to get ahold of people. Along with that, she would like to not lose all of her pictures and music. Please, any suggestions, or even how to get ahold of Applecare in Austria, would be really helpful. Thank you guys so much

[Makosuke]

Sounds grim (particularly on account of the battery thing), but three desperation measures to try, at least for the data:

1) Plug in an external monitor, and see if you can see anything when it starts up. Might be able to get it to boot that way if the screen is just dead, in which case you can at least see the data.

2) Plug it into another Mac via a firewire cable and boot into firewire disk mode; hopefully she'll be able to get at the hard drive that way to salvage some emergency data.

3) Open the thing up, pull out the hard drive, and put it in a 2.5" USB2 or firewire case, and get the needed info off of it on another Mac. Major hassle, obviously, but those cases only run $30 or so in the US, and if she's really desperate for her data before the PB gets fixed, that's the only option. So long as the HD isn't cooked, too, that'll work.

Good luck.

[TEG]

Search Apple's website for the telephone number of AC-EU. Or call Apple Care here and get the number for her and send it to her. The Apple website is also a great resource.

TEG

[yoda13]

I have one of the iBooks with the logic board issues, and each time the logic board has failed, this is EXACTLY the way it acted. However, each time that it did this I was able to string an ethernet cable from it to my PowerMac and network and retrieve my Home directory. Unfortunately, this only works if she had file sharing on before it started to crap out. Your situation may be different, but I was never able to get target disk mode to start up once the logic board started to go.

[Ja Di ksw]

Hmmmmm, so file sharing had to be on? Not sure if it was . . . . How can you tell, and how would you network retrieve the Home directory? A couple people who went on the study abroad with her also have the exact same pb (15" 1.25 ghz). Think she could use theirs to do it?