Changing an iBook Hard Drive

Some time ago, a little over a year maybe, my mother's G3 iBook died on her. She was obviously very upset, as she pretty much ran her entire business on it. Anyway, she went to see a Mac technician who basically told her it had had its day, and after some soul searching she bought herself a new G4 iBook.

Not wanting to see a laptop go to waste, I asked her if I could have the old one. I fired it up, and it seemed to be going OK, until it got into Mac OS 9, and then would just hang. I thought about it, and decided the hard drive needed changing. This was not an easy process, and in fact took months to finish!

What you Have to Do

Well, the first step is physically changing the drive. This is a very, very lengthy and complicated process. I'm no going to go into it here, as I have seen that there are a number of very good websites around with detailed instructions and lovely photographs showing you how to do this. One word of warning (which you will hear repeated anywhere else you look on the subject), this process requires a lot of patience. Clearly, Apple don't want you opening up their computers.

So anyway, what no one else on the Web seems to tell you, is how to get the thing working once you actually have it in your iBook! This is why the process took months for me; I changed the drive, but was not able to use the new one.

When I fired it up, the Mac OS X installer disc would start up, and the installation process would start, but it wouldn't show any hard drives when it came time to choose where to install the disc. This was very frustrating; I knew the drive worked, which left three possibilities. One, I had not connected it properly. I was dreading this one, as it meant opening up the iBook again! Two, the drive was incompatible, or three, the iBook was not sufficient for Mac OS X (I'm not a Mac user, so I wasn't aware of how ridiculous an assumption this is, plus it shouldn't really affect the computer's ability to at least detect the drive).

So eventually, after months of it sitting there, getting occasional thoughts and ideas on how to get the bloody thing working, I tracked down a copy of OS 9. This changed everything. When you boot from the OS 9 disc, rather than boot to an installer, it actually boots a copy of the OS from the disc, and you run the installer from the desktop. I tried this, and same problem as before; no hard drive. But here's what I eventually found.

After some poking around, I came across something called System Profiler. This gives you a hardware list of what is installed on your computer. And to my joy, lo and behold, listed there in the list was my newly installed hard drive. So, I knew it worked, and that the iBook could see it. So why was it not being listed when I ran the OS installers? Well, next to where it listed the drive, were the words 'No Mounted Volumes'. So there was the problem. Although this may seem something Mac users are familiar with, or definitely Unix users (as Mac OS is in fact built on Unix), for a Windows user this might seem unfamiliar. This kind of stuff is hidden away. In older versions, you needed to use the fdisk utility, and there is now the Drive Manager, but anyway, I digress. Back to Mac. So knowing now that the problem was that there were no volumes mounted on the drive, I set about Googling (yes, its a new verb!) how to mount a volume on a drive. Again, no joy. No one out there seems to want to tell you how to do it. And I think this is because its so simple, and so obvious, that people familiar with the environment just assume that users know how to do it. But, as I said, being a Windows user, all this was new to me. So, the short version, of how to get your new hard drive working in your iBook (or other Apple computer) is as follows:

1. Install the drive physically
2. Boot from an OS 9 disc
3. Go to System Profiler to make sure your drive has been recognised by the machine
4. Go to Applications/Utilities and run Drive Setup
5. From here, you can initialise a volume on your drive
6. Install your OS

And voila! I now have a working iBook.

NB One more point for Windows users. You can't just install OS X (well you can but it's not advisable). A lot of stuff needs OS 9 installed to run, so you actually need to install both. Whenever something that requires 'Classic' mode (as its referred to) runs, it fires up a VM running OS 9 and runs your program from in there. I guess that's another indicator of the brilliant simplicity of Apple's OS environment.