UPDATE 14/July/07: The extra power requirements of the Seagate momentous hard drive were immediately apparent, reducing battery charge life to around 2 and a half hours. Over the past 4 months has contributed to reducing my battery charge life to 2hrs max. Another important factor is that the laptop has been in medium use for 2 years now. Originally I was able to get a maximum of 6hours use of the ibook on battery.

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It has been a long standing plan to migrate from commercial to opens source & free (as in speech, not as in free beer) operating systems. This weekend I came one step closer, having rounded up enough penny’s to shell out for a hard drive upgrade to obtain the necessary space required for a duel boot system (I couldn’t bare to lose my data).

After much research I opted for the Seagate Momentous (100GB, 7200RPM, 5 Year Warranty). This beats my standard iBook 60Gig running at only that is getting a couple of year old, and dangerously close to the mean time between breakdown on the bell curve, and noisy too. Although the new drive draws a little more power, reducing the battery life, this is a price I was prepared to pay for a little more speed. Hard drives are one of the slowest parts of a computer, and I could hear my standard hard drive ticking away under the hood, struggling to keep up with my multimedia demands at times. (Those panorama photos require a fair bit of computer resources, and patients on the users behalf).

The plan:
To create a bootable mirror of my hard drive via a usb 2.0 caddy (and set up a few partitions for future Linux installations). Then to disassemble the laptop and swap the drives over, putting the 100Gig in the iBook and the 60 Gig in the usb 2.o caddy. Reassemble the iBook, and boot straight up to my old system.

The cruel reality:
With about 57 steps before you can get the hard drive out something was bound to go a miss. I found the following awesome instructions, with step by step guides. For some reason I got lost at around step 37 of the first link, got frustrated, and searched for some more instructions, finding the second lot which are slightly different but better layed out with more clearer instructions. Note: You will need 3 types of screwdrivers, and i strongly recommend keeping track of where all the 40 odd screws go.

http://www.faqintosh.com/risorse/en/guides/hw/ibook/g4hd/
http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Mac/iBook-G4-14-Inch/Hard-Drive-Replacement/84/15

1st Challenge: Ripping the power jack clean off the motherboard.
Yes, as stated in the second instruction set (but probably not clearly enough) the power connector is very fragile. Despite holding the socket down while pulling the plug out I eventually weakened the connection enough for it to come clean off the motherboard. To my knowledge there is no way to boot the iBook without using the power button. So even if I did complete the 110 steps and get the new hard drive in, I couldn’t boot up! Luck for me I found a friend in Australia). A with high quality soldering equipment. (Having left all my equipment. I was able to re-solder the tiny connection back on, and add some glue for mechanical support. I can’t stress how luck I was to be able to do this repair myself. It could have taken the laptop out for weeks and been very expensive.

2nd Challenge:
Having the computer in bits a peaces, it was a rude shock to find out that RsyncX didn’t make a bootable drive. So when I hooked up the new drive, it simply wouldn’t boot. So I had to put the old drive back in, boot, and try and try again until the new drive was bootable. At this point was was a bit nervous about having to do this while the iBook was half apart. After more research, I tried Apples Disk Utility Restore option, with no luck. Then it was on to Carbon Copy Cloner, which did the job straight out of the box.

For the record I think Apples Disk Utility crashed due to power saver settings which resulted in the computer sleeping in the middle of the backup.

3rd Challenge: Missing half my Applications folder
For some reason CCC failed to copy the entire Applications folder. I check everything else and all was ok, just the Applications folder. So it was that hesitantly I used RsyncX to sync my old drive’s Application folder with my new drive. All went smoothly, OSX found all my applications, and Spotlight re-indexed my hard drive for some reason.

After all this was finished I had 3 ’spare’ screws left from the iBook. Hmmm…. I know were 2 of them were supposed to go (but wouldn’t fit), and the 3rd just fell out during one of the stages! So I had no idea where that one went, but was sure glad it fell out and didn’t hang around to cause further problems.

Conclusion:
It was a tedious procedure, requiring much patience, and consuming the better part of a weekend (including one late night). This is not for the faint hearted, and I can understand why laptops are so expensive to service. However, there is no substitute for doing things your self. Having been my first laptop upgrade, I gained immense practical experience and even had a chance to put my soldering skills into practice.

Recommendations:

• Research everything well
• Have heaps of spare time. Don’t put yourself in a situation where you will get stressed and make mistakes. One slip of a screwdriver is all it would take to wipe out the motherboard.
• Turn of all power saving setting when preforming backup.
• Create accurate screw maps as you take the iBook apart.
• Write to apple and tell them their ease of repair/ upgrade engineering is extremely poor. (Although this is probably intentional as a revenue stream anyhow).
• Ensure the back up is bootable before dismantling your laptop (easyst way I can think of is to buy more expensive Firewire caddy, and boot from external drive after backup. I didn’t have a Firewire caddy and it was the cause of a headache, and lengthy delays waiting for the usb backup.)
• Have a 2nd computer available to do research if/when thing go wrong.

Acknowledgments:

Special thanks goes out to my partner Ellie for her patience and good advice to take a few breaks during the adventure and Thomas for helping me find some tools when in a bit of a hot spot.

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Posted on April 27th, 2007 :: Filed under Technology
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