Broken laptop
hard drive died on the newest iBook g4 this morning. Am going to just order a larger one and do a restore from the last backup I did which is about 2 weeks old. So lost a bit of mail and maybe a bookmark or two but that’s about it. Most of the stuff I want to keep up with I put on here so I can search from anywhere there is a computer. Glad I got this old machine up and running again day before yesterday or I would be really pissed. As it is I’ll have to come off of a couple of hundred bucks or so depending on how big a drive I get.
Looks like a real pain in the ass to replace it too.
http://www.sterpin.net/uk/ddibookg4uk.htm
and
http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/ibook/g4hd/
More later…
Update – may have been overheated. shut it off till it cooled to the touch and tried it again and no more clicking and farting. So… i think the drive is failing and is the cause of the heat but I am not certain. guess I order another drive and replace it whether or not it gives more trouble just to be on the safe side.
From what they have to say at
http://forums.xlr8yourmac.com/drivedb/search.drivedb.lasso
(and filling in the blanks) the machine I have shows definate signs of failure, which is the bad news. the good news is that the drive can be replaced with any notebook drive that will fit, so I am not tired to an apple supplied part.
other bad news is that the drive I spent several hours deciding on, is out of stock from the manufactruers web site. So back to the drawing board or get another 60 gb drive, I guess. But if I’m gonna spend a couple of hours replacing this thing I would rather put the largest drive in that will fit as I keep maxing the 60 gb that’s in there now out.
Themocracy
Have you looked at the older articles at LowEndMac? They seem to have something about laptop hard drives every other day, with links to several places both as to prices and reviews/user opinions. They have someone on there (whose name escapes me at the moment, it is only 5:30 in the morning and the coffee isn’t done yet) who writes extensively about Mac laptops who speaks of upgrading HDs all the time, looking at their archives might be worthwhile, they speak about long-term reliabilty in there too. I haven’t been reading LEM as much as I used to (my prospects for Mac purchase have not been good lately) but I still peruse it occasionally — I like their style, for the most part, and I definitely like Macs. Saw an Intel Mac commercial last night on TV, it was pretty cute — the theme was how after all these years, Intel chips FINALLY get to work in decent machines.
Damn formatting. And I didn’t preview. Just too early. Oh, well.
Fixed the formatting.
Have made a general search on iBook G4 hard drive replacement and the best info that I could find is that I posted links to on here (for my usage as much as anyone). I did find some things on LowEndMac but nothing that wasn’t already covered elsewhere. I think that they had an article on replacing the drive in a 12 inch but elesewhere someone else says that the 12 and 14 inchers are NOT the same critters at ALL when it comes to getting into them.
I can do the deed and even have the tools to do it with but am going to wait till I get another drive to start the takeapart and will still take numerous pix just in case (while in case as it were)…
The drive I was looking at was a Western Digital 80 gb that has 8 mb of cache that was out of stock. they have another model that is 80 gb and 2 mb of cache that is only 120 with shipping where the 60 gb (same series and manufacture) at Circuit City is 150+ tax so will be ordering it soon.
Am switching most stuff to this Linix box and cleaning up and clearing out a lot of crap on the backup drive before making the move. plan to start with a fresh copy of OS X as the copy that was on there was a clone from my first iBook.
nothing like the joy of computers…