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Rebuilding a laptop that has been your main computer for two years is always going to be fraught. Thankfully, after having somehow managing to locate my Panther installation CD’s in a moment of pure chance, I’ve rebuilt my ailing powerbook, and given it a new lease of life.

I’d basically buggered the hard disk a month or two ago, and it was gradually getting slower and slower, despite the more memory. The little hard disk was audibly thrashing away on certain files. Taking a powerbook apart used to be a fraught affair, but there are plenty of online resources to help you along. I opted for the “bugger it, I know what I’m doing approach”, and things proceeded very smoothly. Just a couple of almost-lost-screws, and a spot of nervousness over the internal connector to the hard disk: it looked firmly attached, but was a neat clip-on affair.

The only hiccup was when I realised that the hard disk wasn’t partitioned. It wouldn’t be, fresh from the manufacturers, and the Panther install obviously didn’t recognise it. Strange that it didn’t at least offer the option, but I was fortunate to have a Boot CD I’d prepared previously when first diagnosing my hard disk problem.

After that, it was all easy going (Having good backups helped too!). I’ve now got a nice, fresh, reliable powerbook which just needs a spot of glue to the underside to ensure the case stays in one piece. It’s also blisteringly fast, as it’s no longer retrying failed reads and writes on bad blocks.

Add into the mix a new firewire cable, and I can probably restore most of the applications I had previously installed on to it too. Definitely worth the investment that cable! Oh, and copious numbers of backups. You can never be too sure.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 17th, 2004 at 11:25 pm and is filed under Apple. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.