After a few days of research and contemplation, I decided it was finally time to crack open the case on my broken iBook and replace the broken hard drive. I picked up a new Western Digital notebook hard drive, $75 for 120GB, got a shot of espresso at my favorite coffee shop and said, "What the hell-- it's already broken, right? Can't hurt to try!"
It took me slightly more than three hours to take it all apart, remove the old hard drive, put in the new hard drive, and put the case back together again. I even took the time to clean out all the "gunk" that accumulated inside the case-- finishing off my can of compressed air. There are a few nicks on the laptop case from being pried open by a screwdriver, but it went surprisingly well-- no broken tabs, cracks in the case, or forgotten connectors.
It's taken about an hour and fifteen minutes to partition the hard drive (1 30GB partition for Mac OS X, the other 90 GB are TBD) and reinstall the OS X 10.3 Panther sofware, and I'm still letting it grab all the various security updates and application patches from Apple's Update Service. I could have just restored my previous hard drive from backup and been done with this part of it much sooner, but-- there's something pleasant about a new clean laptop and how fast and responsive it is when you don't have dozens of background processes hogging the processor cycles.
It's not exactly like having a brand new laptop, of course-- but it feels pretty darn close.
1 comment:
*sees Dr Frankenstein standing over the newly snapped into position Mac case*
"It's Aliiiiiiiiiive!!"
congrats on getting the thing up and running and better than he was before.
(hmmm...maybe i shoulda made a 6million$ man reference instead)
;)
~b
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