Ever get the feeling?
So, at the weekend the ‘funny noise’ that kept coming from Bobble’s Powerbook was revealed as being not the fan, but in fact the hard drive tearing itself to shreds (erk). However, help is at hand as we did have a recent back-up and a new HD has now arrived. Tonight I have the fun job of following the somewhat complicated instructions to replace it.
Helpful diagram:
plus
= Happy Bobble!
Also, the internet broke this morning 
– well, really our ISP broke the internet, which was rather annoying. Bobble reports that it has come back now and they’ve admitted it was all their fault was well (this is plus.net by the way).
So, fingers crossed everything will be back to normal tonight. Phew!
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Yay! Now I have to pray it will work. Your repair skills I have full faith in… but machinery is different.
Comment by Bobble — 7 March 2006 #
Happily, it’s all done and everything is working again!
Taking the mac apart wasn’t that bad – just a lot of screws to undo but the cables weren’t as fiddly as I’d feared.
We even managed to pull the old mail off the old drive and so Bobble didn’t lose a thing – whoo hooo!
Comment by bubb — 8 March 2006 #
Looks scary… one question: how do you get the OS onto the replacement hard drive?
Comment by Ken — 15 March 2006 #
We had previously purchased OS X 10.4 (Tiger) as an upgrade, so had the DVD for that filed away safely (phew). Failing that I could have used the restore DVD that shipped with the Powerbook.
Comment by bubb — 15 March 2006 #
Excuse me for being thick but does that mean if you put in a blank HD into the Mac with the Tiger installation DVD, it’ll put a fresh installation on for you? I really need to get a bigger HD in my PB, hence the questions.
Comment by Ken — 15 March 2006 #
Long answer – but bear with me. You have two choices:
1. Install OS X and all your applications and data on the new drive.
2. Copy your existing drive to the new one.
Here’s roughly how to do either.
1. Re-install:
The Tiger & other OS X install DVDs can format Blank HDs for you. The trick is to boot up the install DVD and after choosing a language, go to the menu and select something like “Tools” and then “Disk Utility” or “Disk Tool”. This is the same as the Disk Utility that’s in OS X normally, and that will partition and format a blank HD for you.
Then, quit out of the Disk Utility and continue to install OS X as normal.
I’d find Disk Tool (or Utility, I can’t remember what it’s called) on your current PowerBook first, and get familiar with it. Although being apple, it’s not too hard, and the Help is useful too.
The really tricky part would be migrating all your data from the old HD to the new one. To do that you will need to buy some kind of HD enclosure (USB or Firewire). A quick search on Dabs has found this cheap 2.5″ USB enclosure for example. It’s under a tenner, which is pretty good!
That enclosure will let you mount your old Macintosh HD as an external drive, and then you can copy the data from it. Applications can mostly just be copied across too, although some might lose their preferences (which are generally stored in the user’s Library folder, or the system Library folder). So you might want to just find the installers for your favourite applications and re-install them from scratch.
2. Copy the current HD:
You could put the new HD in an enclosure and copy all your current HD across to it by using Carbon Copy Cloner. That would give you a duplicate of what you have now, but with more space. If you don’t want to have to re-install the OS, I’d do that.
Happily if you go this route, you’ll have a back-up of you old data on the old HD, and you can test booting from the new HD by using the Startup Disk utility, before taking the whole PowerBook apart to install the new drive.
Disclaimer: I’ve not used Carbon Copy Cloner but I have heard very good things about it, and it seems very well suited to what you’re wanting to do.
Comment by bubb — 16 March 2006 #
Thanks very much for that!
Comment by Ken — 16 March 2006 #