PowerBook hard drive failure - advice required.

[philbeeney]

So I get home from work, click my mouse to fire up my 3yr old PowerBook G4 1.5 from sleep and I get presented with nothing apart from a grey screen and the spinning gear icon in the middle of it. Hmmmm........ Switch off PowerBook and restart it. Same grey screen and spinning gear icon accompanied by some horrible noises from the hard drive area. Not so good.

Searches MacRumors forums for similar incidents. Re-set PRAM/NVRAM and the PMU. Still no go, so it would appear that my 80GB hard drive is toast. And it's only one month out of a three year AppleCare warranty. Very convenient…….

Anyway, as there appears to be nothing else wrong with the PowerBook I’m thinking that a new hard drive would be in order. So my questions to Macrumors are:

1. Can anybody recommend a decent replacement hard drive for my PowerBook.? I’ve been through the forums and Hitachi, Samsung and Western Digital seem to be the popular ones. I believe that I have a PATA interface so I’m limited to about 120GB which would be fine and I would prefer a 7200RPM version as well. Do any users out there have real life experience of this.?

2. Can anybody recommend a decent data recovery company in the Toronto area.? I would like to try and recover as much data as possible.?

TIA.

 

[agentphish]

i have the same unit as you. I had my hard disk die 1.5 weeks prior to my applecare running out, so I got it replaced. They replaced it with the same 80gb Toshiba brand drive that was in there...only of course a more updated version of it, with 16mb cache, which was a very nice boost in performance.

I would go with a Hitachi or Tosihba myself if I were to do it on my own.

I also would not reccommend putting more than 100gb in our model because I was told by a friend who runs an Apple Auth. Repair Center that it wasn't designed for the heat of a 120...mine is plenty hot as it is just with an 80...

as for recovery...I don't know what to tell you. With mine, I was able to connect to a G5 in target disk mode, and use http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue_info.php

I found it to work EXCELLENT. Try it first. It got my stuff back, and a friend of mines back who i replaced a HDD in his 1.67ghz pb for.

Good luck. feel free to send a message if you have questions.

 

[philbeeney]

Thanks for the advice.

I've just ordered a Hitachi Travelstar 100GB 7200RPM drive and will install that myself once it arrives.

I'll give Data Rescue a try. I've borrowed a connector cable, so I'll download the demo version, try and mount the old drive when I'm ready and see what can be retrieved.

**crosses fingers**