Whooo, it’s been a long five days since I stared hearing “clicking” noises coming from the hard drive of my old PowerBook. I’ve had this computer for about four years now; it was the first Mac I ever bought. It was with me through college, Arecibo, California, Chile, and Ithaca. I learned PHP on that thing, eventually helping me land a job at an Ithaca Web Design company.

So, yeah, we’ve been tight a long time.

A clicking sound was pretty much means immanent death for a hard drive. Luckily, I was able to backup the more important personal data before the whole thing died. But still, my disk was toast, so I needed to do something. I needed a new hard drive.

I was able to find an 80GB drive on NewEgg for a mere 60 bucks, OEM. Nice. The new hard drive also spins faster than the original (5400 RPM vs. 4800 RPM), so I’d be getting a nice little speed boost, too.

The trick was installing it.

Doing anything hardware related with a Mac isn’t easy, especially in these days of hyperdesign. About the only thing you can easily do on a PowerBook is replace the RAM, which you can access by unscrewing a small plate on the bottom of the computer. But to get to the hard drive, you have to do the equivalent of open heart surgery. I found two good tutorials (from Xlr8YourMac and from iFixit). I used the iFixit guide the most, as it gave the best step-by-step instructions.

It’s a pretty scary process. Lots of things snap off that don’t sound like they should. You remove about 40 screws, almost all of them different. You have to bend your fingers and reach tiny, sensitive, fragile little data ribbons that can be glued to various other pieces on the logic board. All in all, not a particularly pleasant experience. It took me all of four days, mainly because I kept finding that I didn’t have the right tools (6mm hex wrench didn’t fit where it was supposed to). I even had to take my mostly-disassembled computer to Black Box, to get help unscrewing the old-man-who-refuses-to-leave-during-a-hurricane-because- he’s-lived-there-all-his-life-dammit screw equivalent that was holding my old hard drive firmly in place. They did it for free (thanks Black Box!).

During the three days where the guts of my PowerBook were out in the open, Tyler took some classy pictures of the inside of my computer.

The hardest part of the whole ordeal was just getting the computer open to access the hard drive. Once that was done, getting it all back together was a breeze (took maybe 25 minutes). The only tricky part was plugging the keyboard data ribbon back into the logic board, mainly because my fingers are not baby-sized. Once it was all back in one piece, I held my breath while I hit the power button. The mac startup sound never sounded so good.

A few thoughts if you’re going to replace your Mac’s hard drive:

• Use a guide and read through the entire thing first.
• Use an egg crate, and deposit the screws removed from each step into separate sections. Write down which screws are in each. This makes it much easier to put it back together.
• My hard drive’s data ribbon was stuck onto the hard drive from an old sticker that had melted. I justed a small, flathead screwdriver to slowly scrape it off.
• I used two small, flathead screwdrivers to pluck out the microphone and headphone data cables from the logic board.

Ultimately, if you can afford to, I’d probably recommend getting a professional to do this. Either that, or you want some serious mac street cred, for when you’re on the street and need that sort of credibility (happens all the time).