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Upgrading my Powerbook, hit a wall.

A

Ashapalan

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Apr 17, 2005
543
0
England
Hola,

I am in the process of replacing my G4 12" powerbooks hard drive from the stock 60 to a 120. I have placed it in an external inclosure so that i can format the new drive and make a clone of the old one, so that it works once its been replaced.

I'm having a problem at this first step however. OS X recognises that some form of media has been plugged in but cant read it (due to the lack of format). So it directs me to disk utilty to sort it out. However, when i try and format it (using erase and format) disk utility just freezes.

Mac OS X also says the 'media' is 2TB.

Is there something obvious i am doing wrong?
 
Maybe try formatting it with another Mac...if you have an Apple Store near you, take it there and plug it in :)
 
how was taking the PB apart?

How hard was it to take apart the Powerbook? Did you hit any snags there? Did you follow the directions on ifixit, or do you have another source?

I'm curious because I've been contemplating making such an upgrade myself. (40 GBs of music on a "60" GB drive has left me with nothin')
 
lord patton said:
How hard was it to take apart the Powerbook? Did you hit any snags there? Did you follow the directions on ifixit, or do you have another source?

I'm curious because I've been contemplating making such an upgrade myself. (40 GBs of music on a "60" GB drive has left me with nothin')
Click to expand...

I haven't yet taken it apart, just trying to clone the drive first. But when that does suceed, i will be following an ifixit guide :)

It'll be nice to have all my music on my laptop again.
 
Okay i have just tried formatting it with my brothers macbook (had to drive home to do it) And disk utility doesn't freeze, but instead says there is an 'input/output' error.

Does that indicate if the hard drive is faulty or if the enclosure is faulty?

Completly lost with this :(
 
Is your external enclosure compatible with the hard drive in it? I know they both have to be either ATA, or SATA.
 
Okay.

I couldn't get the HD formatted, i tried with my Mac, my brothers and a friends windows.

I still went ahead and replaced it in my laptop to see if the caddy was the cause (i have a bootable external so could have formatted it from there whilst it was inside the laptop). I put my old internal in the caddy and....... it worked fine. :(

So the only logical conclusion i can draw is that the new hard drive i was sent came broken on arrival.

now i have to swap it back out of the laptop and mail it off, then repeat again :)

This hasn't gone quite to plan. As far as taking the laptop apart went, i found it quite fun, the screws need due attention, and removing the microphone and keyboard connectors was fiddly. (for me)

just hope the screws are up to 2 more uses.

The drive is a WD scorpio 120, seems really unfortunate that its dodgy. If you listen carefully (actually its quite loud) you can hear it starting up, cutting out and repeating such a routine again and again. i thought that was because it wasnt formatted but now im thinking its just a bad egg.

The closest my Mac got to identifying it was in disk utility. It thought it was 2TB's in size and unsuprisingly failed to format it.
 
Well, i've now replaced the Hard drive, first was dead on arrival.

Did an Xbench before and after

With old HD averaged 47.85

With new HD averaged 53.68

So some improvement. :)
 
Ashapalan said:
Okay.
The closest my Mac got to identifying it was in disk utility. It thought it was 2TB's in size and unsuprisingly failed to format it.
Click to expand...

Maybe they sent you a 2 TB drive as a bonus! :D Anyway, what speed is the new drive (RPM)? That's a pretty good improvement in speed.
 
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