Cussedness

14.1″ G4 iBook Hard Disk Replacement

Let’s consider the following situation: someone has dropped their beloved iBook G4, and has failed to mention this fact to their designated household geek, preferring instead to continue working on said laptop. This they are able to do for a surprisingly long time, until the machine tries to swap some of its memory out to disk, and encounters an area of the drive’s platters which was scratched in the impact, at which point it crashes horribly and thereafter refuses to boot despite numerous threats and coaxings. What happens next?

The household geek gets to take apart an Apple laptop! Hooray!

I’ve dissected loads of laptops in the past, but they’ve all been boring old PC-type models, where the core components are barely concealed under a layer of polypropylene and a couple of screws, and which you can dismember completely using little more than a small Phillips screwdriver. Replacing the disk on my current laptop requires me to remove three screws and lift a flimsy bit of plastic, nothing more.

Apples are a completely different kettle of oranges. Their components are shrouded in about twenty layers of military grade electromagnetic shielding, held together with about a million microscopic fasteners, and getting at anything more interesting than the RAM or the wireless card requires a steady hand, four different screwdriver bits, and a willingness to bend those shiny, shiny casings almost to breaking point. This repair shop describes the procedure as Difficulty 5 / 5 - Very Hard, which is, frankly, a very silly thing to say to someone like me.

Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyway for the benefit of the exceptionally dim) the warranty on this machine ran out ages ago; don’t try to do things like this if you can phone up a professional and get them to do it for free, that would be really daft.

Here’s what I did:

1. Follow these excellent instructions for replacing the disk in a 12″ G4 iBook. The procedure is almost the same as for the 14.1″ model, there are a few bits and bobs that don’t show up, but the layout and procedure is basically the same. I installed a 30GB disk I had lying around.
2. Restart with the OS X system disks, discover that the installer can’t see the disk you just installed, assume that it’s broken.
3. Buy a new 80GB disk off of your mate who works at a computer shop.
4. Repeat step one with new disk.
5. Repeat step two with new disk, with the same result. Swear profusely.
6. Have dinner.
7. Repeat step two again in the vague hope that you might have somehow connected the disk up wrong. Naturally, you haven’t.
8. Look up “OS X Reinstall” on Google. Have revelation of Damascene proportions upon reading the phrase “Disk Utility” on some web page somewhere.
9. Format shiny new disk using Disk Utility (after realising that ‘Erase’ means ‘Format’ - come on, Apple, that’s a little bit of an oversimplification).
10. Install OS X, bask in glow of installer progress bar, feeling smug.

2 comments • 2007-04-03 21:10 • Categories: Computers, Geek Stuff • Tags: Apple, Fix