Switching Hard Drive on a Powerbook

[ray2123ny]

My old Powerbook G4 has a broken screen and, although I can hear the boot-up chime when power it on, it no longer shows anything on the display. Also, I cannot see anything when hooking it up to an external monitor.

I am ready to trash the laptop, but I first want to get all the data from the hard drive.

I tried accessing my hard drive from another Mac by connecting a Firewire cable and rebooting by holding down "T" but this did not work.

I am now ready to recover my hard drive data another way and I need some advice. I was able to open up the powerbook and remove my hard drive. My friend has an identical powerbook. If I replace the hard drive in his machine with the one I took out from my broken laptop, will I simply be able to boot up my hard drive on his machine. If so, I can then copy all my files onto an external hard drive using his powerbook. After this is done, I can replace the hard drives once again and give my friend his laptop back.

Is it possible to do this or will I run into problems?

 

[Cameront9]

I am now ready to recover my hard drive data another way and I need some advice. I was able to open up the powerbook and remove my hard drive. My friend has an identical powerbook. If I replace the hard drive in his machine with the one I took out from my broken laptop, will I simply be able to boot up my hard drive on his machine. If so, I can then copy all my files onto an external hard drive using his powerbook. After this is done, I can replace the hard drives once again and give my friend his laptop back.

Is it possible to do this or will I run into problems?

There is no reason to put the hard drive in the other powerbook. Just get an enclosure for the hard drive and use it that way. You should be able to boot up from the hard drive in the enclosure.

However, if you can't use firewire mode I have a suspicion that the drive may be dead.

 

[billyboy]

I just went through the pain of a dying hard drive. As Cameront9 says, if you cant launch it in target mode you are probably in trouble.

I would just go straight to Data rescue for Mac. I recovered alll but 296kb of 30GB using Data Rescue. Basically for $5 you can download a disk image that you can use to burn a bootable CD. Connect an external drive to the Powerbook, launch Data Rescue and it will tell you which files it can save. If you see what you want, then you email them 99 bucks for a serial number and you are good to go.