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Today I managed to take apart the iBook and remove the internal hard disk. These things are certainly built to tight specifications, and are somewhat tedious to disassemble. But I’ve done it before, and did it again this last time.

After installing the hard drive in an external firewire enclosure, I hooked it up to my G5 at work, and it lives! All the files are intact, and the drive is now happily indexed by Spotlight under Mac OS X 10.4.

Gotta love Macs….

The one perk of where I work is that we’re in the midst of a computer replacement cycle. This means that a lot of older computers are being marked as no longer needed and are being recycled.

Fortunately, there are a few older Macs in this mix, and they are fair game. As such, I now have an iMac DV+, circa 2000, to use while we save up for a new Mac laptop. The specs of this machine are far from cutting edge, but it has three things going for it:

1. It is relatively compact and will fit in The Burrow.
2. It can run Mac OS X 10.4.
3. It is compatible with Apple’s original Airport 802.11b wireless card.

This last bit is the kicker, as I have an Airport card from the iBook, as well as the adapter cradle for the iMac. I plugged in the Airport card last night, and it worked without a hitch. Given that we use a wireless setup in The Burrow due to unfortunate placement of our phone jack, this is a big plus.

The one thing is that this Mac is slow. I’ve put 512 MB of RAM into it, which helps, but it’s not going to be a world-beater in terms of Photoshop manipulation. But it’ll run the important stuff – namely email and a web browser – and will burn CDs with the best of ‘em.

I’m installing the last of the needed apps on the iMac now, and it should be ready to fly by the end of today.

Yay!

technorati tags: mac, ibook, imac

The iBook is still unusable: it still refuses to boot into target disk mode, and thus is in a bit of a coma (to anthropomorphize the situation). It’s very sad, and very frustrating.

What I plan on doing is extricating the iBook’s internal hard drive and transplanting it into an external firewire enclosure that will allow me to mount it onto another Mac. This way, I can salvage the files that haven’t been backed up in recent moons (yes, fellow techies, I fell into the “do as I say, not as I do” camp with regard to backups of files – that’ll teach me).

Opening up the iBook will also give me a chance to look at the logic board and see what’s gone awry. My guess is that there’s a crack in it somewhere, just small enough to disrupt the circuits.

It was bound to happen at some point. My old, trusty iBook, bought just prior to the Salt Lake 2002 Olympic Games, has finally reached a turning point.

Its trackpad and mouse button haven’t worked for some time (save for a brief respite when the ribbon cable mount was soldered back on to the motherboard), and the screen’s backlight has been flaky for almost a year. The original hard drive was replaced earlier this year, which perked up its system response. While not a speed demon – a 500 MHz PowerPC 750 processor is extremely antiquated these days – it did just fine for sprite and me.

But last night, it decided that enough was enough.

In the wee hours, the iBook froze on sprite. Nothing would unfreeze it, and even trying to get a firmware-level shutdown (a.k.a. a BIOS-level shutdown for PC users, done by holding down the power button until the computer turns off) didn’t work. This morning, the iBook awoke with a long test beep – an ominous sign to a person who has worked on Macs for a long time. Upon subsequent attempts at rebooting, the iBook would give a good startup chime, but would show no video. I enetually pulled the battery from the unit to force it to shutdown.

I brought the iBook into the office this morning to try two additional salvage methods:

• hooking up an external monitor; and
• booting into firewire target disk mode

Unfortunately, neither method worked.

So now I’m at a loss. I have to write a final paper for a class (due next Tuesday), and it looks like I’ll need to do all my writing on campus. Ugh.

And then there are the other things that we need from the iBook: pictures, emails, recipes and other things. It really leaves us in a bind. And given that we just shelled out a good sum of cash on car repairs, there’s no funding for a replacement in the immediate future. In general, the holidays are not a good time for big expenses to pop up.

My kingdom for a new Mac!

technorati tags: mac, ibook