Replacing a Notebook Hard Drive

The hard drive in my PowerBook died a few days ago and the first thought in my head was, “Oh man... now I'm gonna have to shell out 350 bucks to apple to replace my drive and be without my computer for a week.” Then I thought to myself, I wonder how hard it could really be?

Well, I decided to check with my good friends over at iFixit and they had a great step-by-step guide with pictures on how to get to the hard drive. The short of it... a new 160GB Seagate drive and 24+ screws in little Sobe caps later and I'm inside my laptop, scared I might break something.

Well, that looks daunting huh? Well, it wasn't too bad... just a lot of steadyness and being static-free.

After I replaced the hard drive (bottom left in the picture), I restarted onto the Leopard disc and chose the restore from backup option. This lets you restore a system from a backup, such as time machine.

It actually lets you choose any saved state to restore from. I chose the most recent backup version. Nevertheless it took around 4 hours to transfer the 70 GB from my backup drive. Now everything is EXACTLY the way it was before my drive stopped working!