Mark's Notebook

Self Storage

I bought a Powerbook G4 in July, but eventually its 40 GB drive became too confining. This is due to 12 GB of MP3 sermons on the drive, 11 GB of audio in AIFF format that I have recorded myself at round dances, and over 1 GB of photographs from the Vacation Bible School in August. (Note that the system itself takes up 5 GB, and my Applications folder account for 3 GB more. And the 40 GB drive really holds only about 37 GB.)

The sermons are files I brought home from church with the promise that eventually I would edit and downsample them to allow their posting on the CCSJ web site.

Recording audio at round dances was one of the main reasons I bought the thing. Previously, I had been recording to mini disk. But this method required me to play the entire dance again in real time at home if I wanted to copy it to a CD or convert it to MP3. The portable mini disc recorder/players do not allow fast digital audio out. Even the true digital optical input can accept data only in real time.

Anyway, while at Fry's on another errand, I found a 100 GB Seagate drive for only $179. Installing it myself was an adventure. I'd heard that installation in the Titatium Powerbooks was pretty simple, but installation in the Aluminum Powerbooks was Fear Factor fodder.

A brief searched turned up this detailed instruction page:
http://www.pbfixit.com/Guide/53.11.0.html

Note in particular Page 6, which requires the removal of 14 screws of five different types. Also note that two of the screws require a Torx T6 driver to remove. A quick trip to OSH yielded the proper tool, and the young gentleman in the "Tool Corral" was well acquianted with the tools required for both computer disassembly and laminate floor installation (see separate article elsewhere). The hardest part of disassembly was the last picture on Page 7, removing the upper case, because something was catching on the front just to the left of the latch. I tried to bend the rest of the upper case forward, but this only made things worse. Eventually I bent it back down as far as possible, and it came unstuck.

These instructions cover disassembly but not re-assembly. Presumably one can undo everything in reverse order. Since I'm a bit of a klutz, I found it easiest to use a pile of identical plastic boxes to store the screws as they were removed. I put only one type of screw in each box, and I stacked up the boxes in order as I went along. When it came time to re-assemble, the first screws I needed were in the top box. The hardest part about re-assembly was the three battery compartment screws on Page 5, because it is not possible to position the screwdriver perpendicular to the surface. Thus the screws wanted to go in a little crooked.

Even though I'd used Carbon Copy Cloner and CpMac -r -p to copy the contents of one drive to the other, the computer would not boot from the new drive after I installed it inside the case. I fixed this by installing 10.3.3 from the DVD, and then applying the 10.3.9 combo updater. Of course, the nastiest part of this sort of update is adding all the security patches and application updates, about one-third of which require reboots.

It's all done now, the PB is humming along, and I can add one more Mac to the list of those whose warranties I've voided with a Torx driver.

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Last updated Tuesday 13 May 2008