Powerbook hard drive failing

3 December, 12:38

Ack! just as i’m reading this post over at Hicksdesign and thinking how lucky I’ve been with my powerbook, a strange whirring noise eminates from the sleek aluminium case….

A quick look at disk utility confirms what my wallet already suspects – S.M.A.R.T status: Failing. Diagnosis: Expensive. Fortunately I keep a pretty much up to date clone of my system on an external firewire drive using the excellent Carbon Copy Cloner and so a quick reboot later I’m up and running from the external drive and backing up all recent files, fingers crossed, hoping the drive won’t die halfway through.

I’ve always thought of Applecare’s extra 2 year warranty as a bit of a scam and as I’m good with building (and fixing) PCs didn’t bother to take out the extra protection. How hard can it be to change the drive on a PowerBook anyway? Its just a small PC, right?

It turns out that it was fairly easy after all by following the clear and well illustrated instructions at pbfixit.com. With the right tools (and a stiff drink to steady my nerves) I had performed open-drive surgery and replaced my failing ticker with a new bigger, faster Hitachi Travelstar 7100rpm 100GB notebook drive. In under an hour!

I’m not sure I’d recommend anyone does this themselves unless they have some experience already, but it suprized me how straight forward it was. The only really tricky bit was undoing the hidden latch near the CD drive to disengage the keyboard.

I dread to think how much it would cost (and how long it would take) to send back to Apple…..