Upgrading Apple 17-inch Aluminum Powerbook's Hard Drive

After I called my contact at the Red Cross and found out they didn't need me today, I took on upgrading Ellyn's 17-inch Powerbook. It's had some weird disk problems and an earlier attempt to upgrade it to Tiger failed. I had previously ordered and received a Fujitsu 100 GB 2.5" drive and had the needed precision screwdrivers and torque drivers.

This was difficult and a little scary. Some of the screws were so tiny that it was alarming. Reassembling the case, one of the screws is quite attracted to a magnet that's part of the lid locking mechanism.

The Powerbook Fixit Guide at was invaluable.

Before surgery, I recommend that you get your new drive along with an external 2.5" firewire enclosure. Install the new drive in the external enclosure. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone your internal drive to the external drive. Since Apple is so cool, it's trivial to get your machine to boot off of the external drive. Command-option-shift-delete will bypass the internal drive upon bootup.

At this point I upgraded the external drive to Tiger. Rebooting after the install and it was happily booting off of the external drive.

Then I followed the guide and swapped out the hard drive. From long experience of working on machines I know to power them up before reassembling them all the way because often a drive power cable or connector or something has been inadvertently left unconnected. Unfortunately this wasn't really possible with the Powerbook, and of course upon trying to boot it up, it couldn't see the new hard drive.

Well, I got the practice of disassembling it again and discovered that the cool flat cable connector that connects to the motherboard wasn't quite seated all the way. I reseated it and reassembled the computer, and it is now up under Tiger with a 100 GB (OK, really... a 93 GB, I hate how the drive manufacturers count unusable bits in their capacity numbers) drive. 'Nuff said.