Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 how to#
Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 for mac#
Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 install#
Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 serial#
Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 software#

Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 serial#

null modem cable and a DB9-DB25 adapter of appropriate gender), but I couldn't seem to make the Powerbook's serial port work. I got the cable (not sure if it's a null modem cable, so I also got a. I figured I'd first try a serial connection. OK, so I've been too busy with Linux and BSD in the past year and then some to do anything with the Powerbook 1400cs and System 7.6.1.Р В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљРЎСљР В РІР‚в„ўР вЂ™Р’В«ut I thought to myself, what if I could use the Powerbook as a terminal and hook it up to my Linux/OpenBSD boxes? If it turns out to be a dying hard drive, and I'm 90 percent sure that it is, I will do this repair, but I will not be happy about it.Р В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљРЎСљР В РІР‚в„ўР вЂ™Р’В«ut it's what I must do as a user of old computers.Р В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљРЎСљР В РІР‚в„ўР вЂ™Р’Вid I mention that I can swap a hard drive in either of my two PC laptops in under 5 minutes? I'm mentioning it now. Things that cost $1,000 should not be built as - and treated as - disposable. I'm disgusted by whoever decided, from a design perspective, to do this. If I haven't made it clear, it's obscene how many things you have to do to get a hard drive replaced in one of these iBooks.

Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 for mac#

Here are all the ifixit guides for Mac laptops, and here are all the guides specifically for 14-inch iBook G4 laptops, and, drilling even further down, here's the guide on replacing the hard drive in the 14-inch iBook G4. If I get the Firewire backup drive going, I'll probably wait for a sale at Fry's and, if it's the right size, put a 120-or-so GB drive in the iBook. From that site I know now that I need a 9.5 mm ATA laptop drive, and I can get a used 80 GB model from them for $79.95.

Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 how to#

Luckily the Web site provides excellent instructions on how to tear apart Apple laptops and iPods. Of course, I'm going to do this myself, and I would NEVER retire a 5-year-old computer - that's young in my book. You're supposed to have backups all the time, and presumably if your laptop is 5 years old, it's time to just give up and get a new one, because it's tremendously costly to have complex repair work done on a laptop. The fine folks at Apple aren't producing these laptops as products designed to last, say, 10 years. If I can then boot off the Firewire drive, and after that my problems go away (basically the computer stalls and shows me the ever-lovin' beachball until we pick it up to the aforementioned 45-degree-angle), then I need to open it up and swap out the hard drive.

I think the iBook's hard drive does better when cold, and when the computer is held at a 45 degree angle, so I'll try first to get a new backup of the user files and then a full, bootable backup.

Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 software#

I'm going to use the SuperDuper backup software to mirror the drive, if I can even do it. With the hard drive failing - and before now with the prospect of that looming - every owner of a 'modern' Mac needs a Firewire drive, which can serve as a bootable drive in OS X.

Believe me, it's easier than you think to use an iPod as a backup drive, and I'm so damn cheap, I don't have any 'real' backup drives. I've been backing up the user files, sporadically, to an iPod.

It now pretty much qualifies for 'This Old Mac' status, being 5 years old, and after that many virtually trouble-free years, it has a problem. This blog was originally started with my 1996 Powerbook 1400cs in mind, but we also have 14-inch an iBook G4 that we got in 2003. I installed the system on one hard drive and am using the other to back up the /home directory via rsync.

Drilling hard drive mac powerbook g4 install#

The regular FAQ for OpenBSD has excellent instructions on how to install it on an i386 machine, but the supplementary material for doing the install on MacPPC was less than helpful (or not helpful enough to get the system to boot). I really wanted to see how the G4 would do with OpenBSD, but while I was able to install it on two occasions, on neither of those was I able to get the system to boot. I probably could've gotten it to work better with information from the nf file that Debian built for me automatically, but since the system was extremely slow under Fedora, that only made the choice of Debian Etch (which seems made for and tuned to the G4) that much easier. I upped the RAM to 384 MB, and I installed two hard drives.Р В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљРЎСљР В РІР‚в„ўР вЂ™Р’В«esides the stable Etch distribution of Debian, I experimented with the FedoraР В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљРЎСљР В Р’В Р Р†Р вЂљР Р‹edora installed, but configuring X for the GUI video didn't go very well. The box came to me with no disk drives and 128 MB of RAM. My latest project has been to load and run Debian GNU/Linux on a Power Macintosh G4/466.