I share with you here a recent experience I had. What happened, the panic I went through and how fixed it.
It was just an ordinary day's work...
while I was struggling how to add environment variables in my kotlin notebooks when I noticed my laptop was running slower than usual. And since I was feeling a bit frustrated that I cant find any understandable solution, I decided to take a break and do a computer restart. I opened my chess app, played a few games to rest myself for a bit. ⬛⬜⬛⬜
When I was finally ready to get back to work, thats when it happened. My Macbook M1 Pro suddenly wont boot properly. Everytime I try to turn it on, the screen turns pitch black immediately after seeing and hearing Apple's logo and boot sound.
Getting my knuckles cracked and start fixing
I googled my situation and fortunately, apple has some straightforward guide when you Mac doesn't turn on. I read each and obediently followed each possible combination of key reset presses. Persistently repeating them with passion (yes, I can almost hear my keyboard crying from my hard presses) but none of them ultimately worked.
After around 30 tries of persistent trying, I finally quit and figured I have to bring my Macbook to the nearest service center. Or else I won't be able to work tomorrow.
Then I saw a light of hope
I was driving my way to the service center, stuck in traffic when I thought of giving it one more try. And thank God I did 💯.
Tada, it gave a light of hope. After pressing the nvram/pram reset keys (according to Apple, Silicon based chips such as my M1 Pro shouldn't need an NVRAM reset, but I swear some kind of different reset happens when I get to press these buttons 🤷)., Finally, a different, unfamiliar message showed up on screen pointing me to visit support.apple.com/mac/restore.
Onwards to fixing it!
The solution tells I need to connect my Mac to another Mac. Luckily I have an extra macbook provided by the company where I work, (thanks WhiteCloak).
With a handful guide, an extra Macbook, I was almost assured that I'll be able to fix my laptop. Fixing it on my own will save me bucks and time! 💪
Steps I took...
First I had to update the working Macbook. I'm more confident to fix my laptop with Apple's latest patches.
Then I proceeded to plugging both macbook to their respective power adapters, connected the two Macbook via USB C cable and waited for the working Mac to detect the non booting Mac.
Then after everything was setup, I had 2 attempts before successfully reviving my M1 Pro.
The first attempt was waiting for my broken Mac's disk to show up in Finder sidebar. I was reading the instructions carefully. Revive and restore sounds similar but one completely wipes data. I made sure revive is the I wanted.
After selecting Revive Mac..., I waited for the progress bar to finish and waited for it to automatically restart on its own. But it didn't. I restarted again from the pressing of the nvram reset buttons.
To my great worry and anxiety, not only was I not able to get the error screen to show up again, but my Mac disk isn't showing up in the sidebar anymore.
That's when I installed Apple configurator here. I followed the steps indicated on the screen. The options was very much intuitive. Tada, my Mac is alive once again. ✨
Conclusion
Through this dilemma I experienced, I learned to value the importance of persistence and patience.
Persistence, If I didn't give it one more try when I was driving, I would have directly went to the service center and spent a quick buck 💸💸.
Patience, If I didn't read through the steps carefully, I possibly made more mistakes or make things much worse.
I realized having these 2 characters as arsenal of a thriving software engineer will help them tackle and solve problems they encounter everyday. Every problem we encounter is a learning opportunity, and I call them good problems.
One more important thing to note, I realized that, guides and tools available online are less valuable to those who do not have the ability (or contextual knowledge) to use them. I am thankful that I have the contextual knowledge to maximize these said guides and tools.
Lastly, I realized how am fortunate that I have a spare Mac. Thanks again WC.
Onwards to the next headache.