Replacing a hard drive on a 15″ Aluminum Powerbook isn’t that hard. Really.
The hard drive in my Powerbook started to fail last week, making those scary “tschk-tschk-tschk” noises of something rotating rubbing against something else.
Luckily I used Carbon Copy Cloner right when I started hearing the problem, syncing the entire disk (45 GB of 80 GB) to an external one. And then this past Monday the drive officially gave up the ghost. It sounds like sticktion (sounds of the drive straining to move, but can’t), which is weird because I thought sticktion was a malady of the past, like polio.
Anyway I got a replacement Fedex’d from NewEgg and it arrived Weds night. The exact drive is a Toshiba 80GB 5400RPM Notebook Hard Drive, Model HDD2191/MK8026GAX. A good laptop drive.
I took apart the Powerbook using guides from xlr8yourmac.com and PBFixit. The process wasn’t too bad, just be careful to log where each screw goes, keep yourself electrically grounded, and don’t force anything.
With the new drive in, I booted from the external drive with the sync’d image I made with CCC and used CCC to sync back from the external drive to the new internal hard drive. (Actually, I first went through the entire process of re-installing OSX from the DVD that came with the computer. I needn’t have done this)
It looks like things are back to normal for me. I’ve noticed a few strange problems, but no show-stoppers yet:
- on first reboot, it wouldn’t accept my password. rebooting again made it go away.
/var/log/system.logshowed a bunch of:
Jan 13 01:58:39 localhost lookupd[148]: dsstore_fetch_internal 1 fopen Store.160 failed: Too many open files
Jan 13 01:58:39 localhost lookupd[148]: dsstore_fetch_internal 2 fopen Store.192 failed: Too many open files
- The mapping from file types to applications seems to be broken or missing. I need to re-associate files when I open them.
I’ve replaced the powerbook drives a lot. However, when I went to replace a drive on a newer macbook, I was astounded to find that you have to take the thing completely apart to remove it. It is much harder than the powerbooks. what a pain.
Interesting. My 15″ Aluminium Powerbook hard drive just ground itself to a halt too (only 13 months old too). But my problem drive was the same Toshiba model you just installed! I just had to pull the Toshiba out, and install a Hitachi 100Gb and start over.