Scary Powerbook upgrade
My poor old (12″ Al) Powerbook was suffering. The hard disk was getting slower and slower, but only showing the occasional disk error. This all started while we were away travelling, so I picked up a pocket-sized firewire drive and got a bit serious about backing things up.
So, I’ve suffered with a slow, occasionally stopping, laptop for a while. I finally bit the bullet last week and ordered a new hard drive. Now, this is not really stuff for the faint-hearted. To change the hard disk in this one, you have to remove about 30 screws from all sides of the laptop and pop keys off the keyboard and disconnect this and that. You want to know what you are doing.
But as usual the internet provides: pbfixit.com has detailed guides to help you through assembly and disassembly of your computer and has things like a screw guide you can print out to carefully place the screws on as you remove them. For the hard disk change I was doing, it was about 11 pages of instructions with pictures.
Everything went smoothly, except for removing one cable connector leading to the power on-off switch. Carefully trying to separate the plug from socket pulled the socket off the motherboard inside the laptop. (Honest, I was being really gentle :-) Gulp. A bit of fine soldering work put the socket back on and the on-off switch still works.
All is back to normal now. I chose a Western Digital WD600VE drive, a 60GByte one. Works nice. Seems quiet and cool. And fast.
[Update 20/12/2005: Oh, dear me. Yesterday saw a few more disk I/O errors show up in the system log, and then ended up with an unbootable system. I ran DiskWarrior and recovered a bunch of binaries from /usr/bin, some config files from /etc, and some startup .plist files from /private/etc/mach_init.d. I put them all back in the right places and could boot again. I ran another backup of my home dir and all has been ok since. Will this problem come back? Time will tell. Gulp.]
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