My powerbook’s laptop drive had died once, forcing a reinstall of OSX. Then recently, it’s been knocking. It’s a four-year old drive and there’s nothing surprising about it finally wearing down. I don’t trust those small drives anyway, too fragile for the scary and bumpy world.

I really don’t want a new laptop, so I ordered a 100gb PATA-6 (I don’t know what the six means) drive off newegg. It’s a 7200rpm drive which is a step up from the 72gb 5400rpm drive that the powerbook came with. Also a step up from the original drive is reliability. Every time the drive would click, it meant that it was seeking for some block of information so the Mac beach-ball would spin and spin, apps would time out and crash, things would hang and it was generally really annoying.

So when the drive arrived, I was excited but quickly found out that I didn’t have the right sized screwdriver (even in my set of micro drivers). Weird. Ok, so some quick googling and amazon ordering got me a Phillips #0 screwdriver that worked great. Before I was nearly stripping the screw heads and that’s not good. The #0 wasn’t a perfect but it didn’t strip anything and could wedge itself pretty tight into the phillips head screw channels.

I followed a guide in japanese to take it apart, it’s mostly pictures anyway. A similar guide in English is here if you care. It’s best to go slow and not force anything.

So since there’s about 40 screws you have to take out, a big workspace with no pets or children is recommended ;) . Take the battery out as usual. Then take the cover off behind the battery, this is what you have to do to replace the memory. Then take off a bunch of screws on the bottom and side and disconnect the keyboard ribbon cable. A small piece of plastic came off and I was flipping out but it’s normal apparently. After taking the keyboard off, you’ll see the hard drive in the lower left hand corner.

There’s four screws holding the drive in. You have to move the ribbon cables (see the guide) and move some thermal tape around. I took off six screws off the hard drive itself which isn’t neccessary (oops, hope I didn’t break the seal, ah, it’s dead anyway). Then just take the ATA adapter off the old drive and put it on the new drive (I bent some pins doing this).

A big tip: I placed the screws in groups on a table in order of when they came out. Keyboard screws, memory cover screws; groupings like that. Putting the screws back in was much easier this way when you work backwards.

So then I booted it up and the OSX install DVD saw the new drive. That’s the test for happiness. Things run a little bit snappier. It’s not some shiney new Macbook but it’s not a $3000 fix either, it was $104.