Uellue's Blog

iBook surgery

On friday my beloved iBook didn't wake up when I opened it. Instead the hard disk made sounds like rtrtrt...rtrtrt...rtrtrt...rtrtrt... Powercycling didn't help, so I decided to replace the harddisk. This sounds easier than it is, because you have to disassemble an iBook to get to the harddrive buried deep inside the "guts". And iBooks are not made for easy disassembly!

I had some experience with opening an iBook before, and I still remembered how it took a load off my mind when this little cutie booted again.

Anticipating the worst I checked the prices for the new Apple MacBook. Well, if I failed to repair my iBook I had to pay roughly 1400 € for a new one. Certainly too much for my taste!

Atelco in Raisdorf only had a 60 GB notebook drive, so I bought it although it meant downgrading from my 80 GB drive. To make a backup of the old drive I also bought an USB 2.0 to IDE and SATA adapter.

Following this excellent guide I went to the next hardware store and bought a Torx T8 and a Philips #0 screwdriver. At home we have tons and tons of different screwdrivers, but most small ones are ultra-cheap crap. I mean, why do people produce, sell and even buy this stuff? They usually "screw up" on their first or second screw...

These are the tools I used:

The hardest part is to remove the plastic shell, because you have to release a few notches and you might easily break something. I used the wooden tools you can see on the picture above for that; it worked quite well. On the next picture you can see the almost disassembled iBook:

Fortunately I managed to back up the data on the broken hard disk (although there is almost nothing important on it), but the drive is really broken, it paused during backup again and again, making the rtrtrt...rtrtrt noises. The new one works smoothely, I already installed OS X again and decided not to use the backup except of a few precious files like the browser's bookmarks. I had too much old stuff on the iBook anyway. Now I hope that the next time my iBook gets broken I have significantly more money so I can buy such a nice dual-core MacBook or MacBook Pro...