Powerbook G4 - Swapping Hard Drive ??

jwhite5598 said:

Hey, I' have both a iBook g4 1.42 and a Powerbook G4 1.67 and I'm looking to sell my iBook and strictly use the powerbook for myself. I have all my stuff on the iBook and the powerbook has a fresh install of Leopard and has nothing I want to keep. Now what I want to do is just swap the hard drives between machines. I want to keep my iBook drive because its 160GB where the powerbook is only 80GB. Is it possible for me to just sway the hard drives in the machines and not have to reformat the ibook drive that has all my files on it?

any input/ help is greatly appreciated

Thanks.

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I have taken the ibooks apart at work many times as an apple tech and it is not fun. Just getting the back cover off is a pita. Then there is a metal cover that has to be removed and then the hard drive is under another piece of sheet metal that has to be bent up to get to the hard drive. Don't forget to take the keyboard off and the wireless card as well as screws that are located around the edges of the keyboard.

Or you can come in from the other way and take the topcase off which isn't any easier the only thing that prevents is bending the sheet metal up.

Besides replacing a power supply on a G5 tower, the ibook has to be the worse computer to do anything on.

You are truly better off buying a new HDD for the G4 1.67 if you need more space.

I hope this helps.

Since your PowerBook shipped originally with 10.3.7 and the iBook with 10.4.2 (see here) you should have NO trouble swapping the drive directly. All installs include all drivers. The only time you have trouble is where the system version is close to the original shipping version.

You may have trouble with iTunes store purchases (de-register the iBook FIRST) and Adobe commercial software (de-authorize them too) and any other software that bases it's serialization on the serial number or MAC address of the machine. I think most of Apple's "Pro" software does this too, but you don't need to de-authorize.

Also, any settings that are in the "By Host" folder of /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences will be defaulted by that is no major problem what-so-ever!



Mind you, I don't envy the iBook take apart. Done too many. Mind you, I think the PowerBook G4 12" is MUCH worse for things like the optical drive!

Edit: and a 160GB 7200RPM PATA drive isn't cheap compared to a SATA
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