Archive for December, 2011

Five or so years ago I gave my 14″ iBook G4 to my in-laws because we’d upgraded and my in-laws really needed a Mac. To date, that’s one of the best laptops I’ve owned (I have a little emotional attachment because it was my first Mac notebook). When we visited the in-laws for Christmas this year, Steve (dad-in-law) and I noticed that it was on the verge of going to meet Steve Jobs in the sky. Here’s a video of the sound that the iBook’s drive was making:

It’s really easy for me to sell the notion of buying a new Mac to my in-laws (or anyone, for that matter), but it just wasn’t in the cards for them. They kicked around the idea of buying a new iPad as their collective Christmas present, but they’re needing to focus their finances on getting their house ready to sell. So, I offered to bring the trusty iBook back to Austin and replace the drive for them. I thought this was going to be a simple feat seeing how I’ve done this kind of surgery before.

Well, upgrading an iBook G4 hard drive ain’t easy. And to add insult to injury, I figured I’d upgrade the OS to Leopard.

Here’s what I learned.

• Getting to the iBook hard drive is intensive. I used this YouTube video to help me through most of the process. Worth noting that this video is of a 12″ iBook while mine is a 14″ iBook. So there are quite a few extra screws on the 14″ model. Just have patience.
• An iBook uses an IDE drive. Most drives today are SATA. I drove over to Fry’s yesterday afternoon and picked up a 160GB 2.5″ IDE drive for $75. One of my gadgets that’s worth it’s weight in gold is my universal drive adapter, which made it easy to format the drive and install Leopard.
• Since an iBook is PowerPC architecture, there are a few caveats:
  1. If you’re installing Leopard onto an external hard drive first, make sure you partition and format the drive correctly. Using Disk Utility, select the root drive, then create 1 partition (or however many you want/need). And here’s the important part!: Click the ‘Options’ button. That will bring up a dialog where you choose the partition scheme. For a PowerPC Mac, you’ll need to check Apple Partition Map (not GUID Partition Table).
  2. Here’s the awesome kicker: you’re not going to be able to install OS X Leopard onto the Apple Partition Mapped drive.  This means you’re going to have to install Leopard on another external drive (assuming you’re doing this via the external drive route) that’s formatted using the GUID Partition Table.  Once you have Leopard installed on the GUID drive, use Carbon Copy Cloner (or whichever app you fancy) to make a bootable clone of the drive with Leopard on it onto the Apple Partition drive.

It took a lot of trial and error, scouring the web and re-doing things to finally get Leopard up and running on the iBook G4, but it was totally worth it.