PowerBook Hard Drive Swap: What Not To Do.

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The instructions I found made it look easy. Remove screws, remove memory, remove keyboard/keypad frame, remove hard drive brackets, remove hard drive, replace hard drive, repeat process, but in reverse.

What could be simplier than that? And so I began…

Taking all those screws out was easy enough until I got down to removing the screws that hold the keyboard plate to the body, near the lid latch. Three screws are there and they’re very small. One dropped inside the laptop and I could NOT find it. No rattle. No noise. Nothing. Maybe it hit the floor. Maybe.

I got everything apart and removed the original Toshiba hard drive, now dead. The PowerBook uses two brackets to hold the hard drive in place. Instead of the standard four screws to hold the hard drive to the bracket, the Toshiba drive uses four metal ‘nubs’ which fit into the brackets.

The Seagate hard drive I bought from PowerBookResQ did NOT come with extra screws. Screw holes, yes. Screws, no. How do you get the hard drive into the brackets without screws? I was screwed.

Fortunately, I also belong to the ‘Don’t Throw Anything Away Club™.’ My father bought me a lifetime membership that can be handed down to first born sons.

Rummaging through my ‘special’ box, I found screws left over from previous hard drive installations and they fit perfectly. I had to attach the bracket to the hard drive first, then put in the screws, then attach the bracket and hard drive to the Mac using the T8 Torx wrench.

The T8 Torx wrench is essential. A must. Not just for the hard drive, but other places, too.

OK, so far, so good. The hard drive was in. Then I followed the installation instructions, in reverse. You know; backwards, and began to put everything back together again. Everything went fine. Almost.

When putting in the remaining two screws to hold the keyboard assembly to the frame, I lost another screw. It fell into the laptop just like the other one and I couldn’t find it. I slowly shook the laptop while listening for a rattle. No rattle. One screw left.

Worse, the keyboard/keypad section wouldn’t seat properly. So, I pulled everything apart again and found that I’d forgotten to reconnect the ribbon cable that connects the keyboard. Worse, I’d crumpled up the ribbon cable while putting the keyboard back in the laptop’s frame. Uh oh.

Using a little more care this time, I managed to get the keyboard ribbon in place, and get all the other screws (minus the two I’d already lost who-knows-where inside the laptop) into place. While the keyboard/keypad assembly fit fine this time, the lid would not unlock from the frame when I tested it.

There’s probably a limit on how many times you can take apart a laptop before you get it all back together again. My limit had already been reached. Still…

“However, the screw would NOT come out. It didn’t actually ‘screw’ in. It more or less sat there. I figured a little super glue would take care of the problem and my figuring was sufficient.”I took it all apart again to figure out what was wrong with the lid latch. With all the pieces apart, it worked fine. Put back together, the latch would not work. I checke three or four times.

Clearly, my stubborness at doing the same thing, the same way, many times over, notwithstanding, something was blocking the latch.

Closer inspection revealed the location of the two lost screws. They’d fallen against the magnet in the latch. Mister I-Can_Repair-Anything dodged a bullet. I removed the scews and put them where they belonged. Everything went back together perfectly except for the very last screw in the aluminum frame.

I was in a hurry by then and placed the final screw in the DVI screw hole, instead of the frame screw hole. They’re side by side. Anyone could have made that mistake. Even an experienced repair technician.

That’s my reasonable story and I’m sticking to it.

Try as I might, the screw in the wrong hole would NOT come out. It didn’t actually ‘screw’ in. It more or less just sat there in the hole, intimidating me, taunting me. I figured a little super glue and a pin would take care of the problem, and my figuring was sufficient.

At that, the PowerBook was back together again and sporting a new, though unformatted, unpartitioned Seagate 120 gig hard drive. I started up the laptop and heard the familiar chime. Initial bootup was on the external backup hard drive.

I opened Disk Utility, found the 111 gigabytes remaining of the 120 gigabyte Seagate hard drive, formatted it, and installed OS X Tiger.

Everything worked great. No scratches. No dings. No missing screws. No odd noises. My laptop is back and has twice the storage.

Life is good when you’re a PowerBook owner. But next time…

What about you? Do you handle the repairs yourself or send out for expert help? Click Here for what others have to say in Bambi and Tera’s Mac360 Community Forums…