I spent almost the entire day fighting with a Heisenbug. My Powerbook’s hard drive started making that bad clicking and gronking noise that dying HD mechanisms do, although there were no errors in the log or anything informative at all. Today it did this a few times and crashed the machine hard. After doing some of the usual stupid human tricks to see if it was software-fixable I went off to the Apple Store and sat at the Genius Bar. The guy was very helpful but the problem had stopped in true Murphy’s fashion. Got to see mr_flippant for a bit which was nice.
So now I have to get it to do it again. I’m trying to figure out if something about the environment here at home caused the problem or set it off. How annoying! Grar.
The guy next to me was there with his 25-year-old daughter’s iMac which had died with her entire college career on it including the exam due tomorrow. No dice. He left to go to the place that charges thousands of dollars to do disk recovery.
I ate alone, as I always do, and watched people. My brain is a library of human experience, very little of it mine.
I feel like I cooked a meal for you and you never showed up because you thought you’d owe me for it.
Be My Blog 
Are PowerBook hard drives just normal 2.5″ IDE drives? When I opened my 15″ TiBook up, it contained an IBM drive with a sticker suggesting that it has some sort of custom Apple firmware.
I’m wondering whether I could replace my PowerBook’s drive with a larger one without paying the 300% Apple markup on doing so.
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Yeah, I replaced my wife’s ibook drive with one from compusa. The only trick was having to use the disk initializer thingy on an OS9 install cd to partition it. For whatever reason that doesn’t seem to be on the OSX cds and it won’t see the disk unless you do that.
I also learned that taking apart ibooks is not for the faint of heart. 🙂
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the easiest way to do that would be to put your old internal in a FW enclosure and boot from that then use the disk utility to simply clone your old drive to the new one.
Happy mod-ing
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I’m not sure where you’d get them where you live, but here OWC ( http://eshop.macsales.com/Catalog_Page.cfm?Parent=91&Title=2%2E5%22%20IDE%20%26%20SCSI%20for%20Laptops&Template= ) has good replacement drives. I might get a 60 gig one soon.
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i think that’s when the girl will learn about the power of backing up her data.
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