So apple decided to give me a crappy hard drive that died outside of my warranty. i am now trying to replace it. i'm following the guide at pbfixit.com for replacing the battery. however there's a "clip" apparently that is holding the right hand side of the case together and i see absolutely no way to unclip it. any help would be appreciated. i've been working on it for about 2 hours and i've had about enough and i'm ready to sell the pile of crap and buy a PC. apple gets "crappy design award of the year" for not making their hardware servicable that's for sure. and no, i'm not paying apple @$$loads of money for them to fix what should be simple for anyone to do.
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Replacing 15" powerbook HD
- Thread starter DXoverDY
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Colin over at command-tab.com replaced a few things in his PB, which involved opening it up, maybe this article can help.
I worked on that clip alone for about an hour. Then I managed to pull the lower case section out a little bit to disengage it. I also used a modified popsicle stick instead of a black nylon stick 
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.Counterfit said:I worked on that clip alone for about an hour. Then I managed to pull the lower case section out a little bit to disengage it. I also used a modified popsicle stick instead of a black nylon stick
heh.. i figured it out. i accessed it from the optical drive's slot. pbfixit says to go in through the little gap you create between the top and bottom half of the base. i ended up putting some nice dents in my pb from trying to wedge stuff in there.. lo' and behold going in through the optical drive and up released it in 10 seconds. i'm going to email them and let them know they suck. that said, i wouldn't recommend pbfixit.com to anyone.
DXoverDY said:
Thanks for the tip. apple's laptop are always such a pain to open up. Changing the hard drive on my toshiba only involved taking out 5 screws.
NYmacAttack said:Thanks for the tip. apple's laptop are always such a pain to open up. Changing the hard drive on my toshiba only involved taking out 5 screws.
parts of pbfixit.com were good.. but that was the simple stuff.. the hardest part of the whole bit was doing this, and they essentially give you the wrong info. i should've taken pictures, but for anyone who is interested.. oh my 15" powerbook revision C, this holds true.
if you get to the part of having to remove this latch. get a nice dentist poker stick thingie and instead of prying at the case, simply push aside the optical slot protector/dust stoppers on the left side, right at the first little slit going vertically. insert the tip of the dentist thing into the area .. you can see the case and the latch if you look very carefully. put it in between them and gently pull forward while lifting on the top case gently. it comes off very very easily. this will essentially mean you touch ZERO of your case while taking this off. if you go in through the gap as pbfixit.com says, depending on the tool (metal or whatever) it will quickly turn nasty and you'll be ruining your case... if someone would like pictures, i can take them... it won't be real accurate, but i can point out the obvious parts. maybe i'll even put a guide together for it to help people..
going to take photos now. be back shortly with pics.
EDIT: they're very hard to take, due to the small area i'm trying to capture. i'm going to try more later.. but i'll post back here when i get better pics.
Well, I used the official documentation for the first aluminum 15" PB (which is what I have). It says to use a "dentist pick" to undo the clip. An allen wrench works fine, as long as you don't drop it into the optical drive like I did