Apple Powerbook G4 hard drive replacement

[adreanjean]

I installed the hard drive, but now the computer will not power up. Any suggestions?

[mattsvids1]

i didnt enjoy the music where do i go now??

[seriesdetv]

I have A g4 ant put a used nof formated hdd and now the mac do not see my hdd the question some can help to know wath hapen? thanks

[NY152A]

Too fast...I have got some headache from watching this. Thanks anyway..It's still helpful.

[Armoredlamb]

I was going to pull out the HDD to see whats on in (got a broken one without a power cord), but I think i'll just wait until i have a cord 2morrow. lol

[MZax1101]

Good work

Were did u get your tools ?

[rickytrix]

what type of hard rive PATA or ide? i want to install a SSD but it looks when i do research it shows me that it has to be PATA SSD 2.5 is that correct ?

[leitao1996]

thank you so much! this is like the only video i found that made sense.... thanks so much! i am now on my mac!

[leenevin2]

i have badly dented my pb g4 17 therefore i need to replace the bottom houseing. If i replace it with a housing from the same model but with a different processor speed (1.67ghz case for 1.33ghz) will it be compatible ? thankyou, please help :)

[weinerschnitzelboy]

@leenevin2 Processor speed doesn't make the housing different. It should be the same. Unless the placement of the screws is different it should work.

[jeidry305]

hey bro i got a 17" powerbook g4 nd i took it apart idk how to put it back can u help me

[JessicaA39]

Thanks so much. If I have a 15 inch PowerBook g4 with the 1.25 ghz that's giving me serious hard drive problems and slow problems is it worth it to purchase a new hard drive and 2gbs ram? I love this computer and just curious if I buy all this stuff if it's still gunna be really slow. Thank you so much!

Jess

[Armoredlamb]

@JessicaA39 The extra ram will help a lot. the better HDD will help, but not as much as the ram

[keykeyx10000]

Stop apologizing, you did a great job!

[nickdotvr]

@keykeyx10000 Thank you!

[ShadowMantis9]

Thank you for posting this, it really came in handy!

[nickdotvr]

@ShadowMantis9 I'm very happy that it did and to this day amazed how much interest there is in a simple video that was only meant to give people a general idea of how much work they are getting into - I'm making a follow-up one with more details around each step soon. Meanwhile thanks for watching and very glad to have helped!

[hellssantaclawz]

dude thanks so much what hard drive did you put in man i got the ugly ubuntu setup

[jordan23kl]

what did you do when you terned it on

[jordan23kl]

what do you do after you have finished puting in the hard drive,like when you tern it on what you have to do?

[PCGamerTech]

What is this song from?

[JesusCanon]

I just did all of this... got the new drive in all well but I can't get the OS DVD disc in the drive. Strangest thing! I've tried all the boot / key combos to eject anything in case there is anything in there.... but nothing comes out and I can't get the original DVD in. nickdotvr: after you installed the drive, did you just put the OS disc in at boot-up?

[nickdotvr]

Yes, holding down the option key it gave me an option to boot from it, then I went to disk utility and formatted the new drive as one partition and proceeded to install OSX on it.

[videolerker]

lol. wonderful design

[nickdotvr]

Heh, don't get me started... It's a good thing I sped this up and got rid of the audio track because I might've cursed a few times too many during this after replacing the hard drive on a REGULAR laptop took all of 5 seconds and 1 screw.

[jologs21]

Question; Can you upgrade to 4 gigs of memory ram on power book g4, although its tiger operating system?

[SwishaHouse7777]

yea i think i have the same computer and when i turn it on it shows a ? and a finder logo in a folder, and then go's to a apple logo, regular looking startup, and stays there for about 20min and then turns off. any help would be great.

[zerokillez]

Hey can u help me my g4 laptop won't boot up when i turn it on it will get stick on a blue screen what can i do

[nickdotvr]

Does the screen display any kind of an icon/graphic on it or is it a solid color?

[HxXFromFirstToLastXx]

yooou in trouble mate

[hitman2070]

Alright I'm confused....I've seen several videos about replacing the hard drive for a Powerbook G4 but the bottom of my G4 looks different from all the ones I've seen in the videos (including yours)...what gives??

[vacputer]

Your powerbook is a titanium. these are later aluminum models.

[vacputer]

Note: that was a guess.

[TomFehring]

Nickdotvr,

I tried another disk and got the same result. The optical drive simply pops it out after a few seconds.

I'm a novice to Macs -- but fairly proficient with the other guys.

I replaced the hard drive because the diagnostic indicated that it had failed. But now, with a new drive, I can't load the OS via the optical drive. The common factor would seem to be the bus or cabeling or something. Any ideas of where to look?

Tom

[megacyberdude69]

You must partition and format the NEW drive with Disk Utility before you can RE install the OS.

[TomFehring]

NIck,

I'm stuck! I replaced the hard drive on my daughter's PowerBook G4, following fairly detailed instructions. When powering it back up, I got a symbol on the screen that alternates between a question mark and a file folder.

OK, that makes sense. It needs to load the operating system. So I popped in the Mac OS X install disk 1, started it up while holding the C key down and prayed. My prayers haven't been answered. The disk comes out after a few seconds.

Any ideas?

ThomF

[nickdotvr]

Hey Tom,

Yes, the alternating question mark/file folder's normal.

No, the Mac OS X install disk popping out is not - it's supposed to start reading it. I guess I did hold down the C key and not the option key (I also get confused because I own a MacBook Pro, I was fixing this Powerbook for someone) but in any case all versions of OSX with the exception of Snow Leopard are supported by the Powerbooks - have you checked to make sure that the disk isn't scratched up (by chance)? Try another disk?

[The23Osiris]

It does matter what format the disk is in, and what format (s) your laptop can read. My OSX 10.4 disk was in DVD+ format, but the drive in my Tibook would only read DVD-, so I had to make a copy of my install disk on my desktop in DVD- format.

Hope this helps.

[JeshuaLivingWord]

just a stupid question, i have a ps3 and it's hard drive is broken. i bought a new hardrive and it didnt fix the YLOD. So i have 2 hardrives, will it work in my apple powerbook g4?

[nickdotvr]

Hey Jeshua - not a stupid question at all but while you are right that the PS3 just uses a laptop drive [I had to look up a PlayStation 3 Hard Drive Upgrade (HOWTO) video on here to see what kind of drive it has since I don't own a PS3] that's 2.5 inches just like the Powerbook G4, there is 1 big difference. The Powerbook G4 has ATA/IDE connection & drive. The PS3 uses SATA connection. It basically means you'd need an adapter but then it all wouldn't fit because there's not much space in there.

[Raketmensch00000]

This is probably a stupid question but i'm unfamiliar with macs. I got a hand-me-down PB G4 from my brother and the hard drive just crashed. I don't have a copy of Mac OS, and if i can't find anyone who does, would it be possible to download it on a PC and but it on a CD from there, or are there formatting issues? Actually buying an OS isn't on the table.

[nickdotvr]

Look up TransMac (free for 15 days of use) - it allows you to burn DMG files [the Apple image format, equivalent of ISO files for PCs] in Windows.

[megacyberdude69]

Buying a copy of Retail OSX 10.3 or 10.4 will allow you to reinstall. Apple used to provide OS Restore CDs but I dont know if they do anymore.

[oltredding]

Good video - my starting point. I have read all I could find on this subject, but video helps. I used a USB cable and Carbon Copy Cloner to make a copy of the 80GB original drive to a 320GB Western Digital. Lets hope in boots on the first try. if I encounter any problems I will write back - but I suspect it will be a piece of cake. TR

[nickdotvr]

Hey, that was my idea when making it - I'd read up and seen iFixit's picture guide but I still wanted to visually see what goes into the process so I'm happy to have helped out others in that way.

A lot of people say Carbon Copy works great - I have yet to try it out for myself so if you see this let me know if it really works out - one simple way to test it would have been if your WD drive had firewire - you could just hold the option key and boot off the external (OSX supports that).

[curlyamygirl]

Hey, thank you so much for this! It's actually super helpful regardless of the camera angles. I'm probably going to have to do the same to my Powerbook soon. I think so.. I get my Apple loading screen and then the icon that says, "Hey, thinking about working here.." and then it just shuts off. I'm so tired of fighting this computer. But thank you for giving us visual folks a guide!

[nickdotvr]

Amy, glad to have helped out some people out there!

You can message me anytime with questions and I try to write back ASAP as well.

It's not too scary of an operation, especially now that you've seen that it's rather straight-forward and ifixit has great step-by-step with pictures to follow (as I did while making this video).

If it was some other kind of a laptop worth a few hundred bucks I'd say not worth yout time but Powerbooks are well worth repairing (and still run great nowadays!!)

[irulethe70s]

how dead was it try using a 2.5'' ATA hdd enclosure to get the data

[nickdotvr]

It had, what I like to call, the CLICK of death ... in other words every few seconds it would click if you're not even doing anything and if you are trying to access data it would click randomly and often not read the data - the person was feeling very lucky since the most important stuff got saved to an external drive but the operating system had definitely become unusable.

[irulethe70s]

so it wasnt recoverable

[nickdotvr]

basically.

[irulethe70s]

did you try???????????

[nickdotvr]

Yes, not much you can recover when the thing does a click-death ... Starting the computer in "TARGET" mode when connected to another computer via Firewire does the same thing that having the drive in an enclosure would do - it helped to recover some files but on some the drive would get stuck in a reading "loop" and the only way to get out without waiting for 1000 hours was to power it down, power it back up and try pulling some other files.

[jc69montero]

Definitely a very unuseful video. Your back is really annoying...

[Risket]

You really should have had the camera angled differently. All we see is your back during some of the extremely important parts. I'm going to be upgrading the hard drive and RAM in my girlfriends Mac. Her hard drive died and Apple wanted $300 to replace it with another 80GB HD. We spend less than that and we're putting in a 320GB HD and upgrading the RAM from 512MB to 2GB. iFixIt is the best!

[nickdotvr]

*sigh* Does nobody read the "more info" nowadays? It is not meant as a detailed how-to video- there are some excellent ones out there for that. This video was created with the purpose of visually demonstrating to people how much work they are getting themselves into. I know it sucks and for my next HOW-TO video I'll be swapping the HDD in my MacBook Pro with a SSD and it will be in HD and step-by-step. I agree with you that iFixIt IS THE BEST, wouldn't have done it without their excellent guide!

[hairbird]

this video is useless. dude-- learn how to make a helpful video instead of wasting people's time.

[nickdotvr]

this video has been QUITE useful to a number of people (check the rest of the comments). dude-- learn how to read that thing on the right of the video that says "more info" instead of wasting your time posting criticism to a video that clearly wasn't meant to be a "step-by-step" instructional video to begin with (but I have provided a link to a site that has the step-by-step instructions I followed).

[andeyejah]

hi my drive is dying on my 12 inch power g4 i went to a few shops but nobody could tell me which drive to buy in the specs it just says ata but which kind ata would work?please help thanks.

[nickdotvr]

check out "more info" for a link to ifixit where I learned how to replace the drive, they also have drives that'll work, I'll re-send you the same message I sent falconwagon61 a week ago since it was more or less the same question (see 2 comments down from yours).

[enigmo08]

ata is the same as ide

[falconwagon61]

Where did you get the hd from? I have a 12 inch, and i'm not sure which hd i should get. Any recommendations?

[ganjaking187]

too much of a pain in the ass just buy a usb harddrive lmfao

[nickdotvr]

Haha, agreed as long as it's got firewire and you don't need to be super-mobile you can boot straight off the external saving you all that work but then if you just want the laptop's drive to work... I'm making a video (with MUCH better camera angles) showing the replacing of a slow internal drive with a solid state one which makes a hell of a difference in the way the thing performs.

[nickdotvr]

I know, that's the plan, only next time it's an Intel-based Mac Book Pro and I'm going to be replacing the HDD with a SSD.

[mtvguy54]

WTF? Get out of the way !!!!! Jeeeeez

[nickdotvr]

Read "more info" to the right of the video.

[jonnyboyb79]

great work installing the hard drive, next time i think you need a new angle on the video so we dont see so much of you and more of the computer!

[nickdotvr]

And I completely agree with you about the camera angle, see my response to the comment before yours / the "more info" section of the video as it explains why it turned out this way. Thanks for watching!

[kenoshad]

too much of your back

[nickdotvr]

I know, click on "more info" and you'll find out why.

[RighteousLives]

Man your a life saver

honestly my dad didnt think i could do it with out wrecking the whole computer

thanks alot homie

[daboothproductions]

replaced mine with a 240 gig and i have no idea what im doing with computers . watched this video and changed mine in about 20 minutes .... everything worked fine ............. I GOT THE LOVE OF MY LIFE BACK ......... I LOVE MY MAC

[nickdotvr]

That's SO AWESOME to hear, did you read the "more info" and check out ifixit (dot) com's step-by-step picture guide as well (it's what I was learning from when I made this just to give people a visual idea of how much work it is.

Glad to read that yours works perfect too now!

[tombell12]

I see you replaced a "Fushitsu" with a 120GB WD Scorpio. Good choice :D

[nickdotvr]

I'm impressed that you caught that!

[tombell12]

Well at the video's speed it took a bit of good timing with the pause function and I was interested to see who the dying culprit was (Fushitsu) and the breath of fresh air (WD Scorpio). Does the Scorpio work a lot better then the Fujistu ever did? ;)

[nickdotvr]

Haha, yeah but even so that's ... wow! Hehe, the speed was just because I didn't quite know what I was getting myself into so I wanted to document it so other people can see how it goes, just get an overall impression of what it takes, not like a detailed step by step (I'd love to make one of these as well since people are curious). It was for this lady I know and she's been very happy with it ever since so yeah, I'd say it's working out fine.

[tombell12]

Fanks for subbing me :D

How did the Fushitsu cack itself? Was it scraping and/or clicking? I've heard some bad scraping noises of drives coming from Macbooks :(

The music gets interesting once it reaches the OS install disc phase ;)

[nickdotvr]

You're right it made one NASTY click. Curiously OSX could boot up just fine, that section of it was operating good 'nufff - you simply couldn't launch any app without the thing grinding to a painful semi-halt... I say semi-halt because you could hear it go click click click click GRRRRRrrrrrrrrr *spindown* and repeat over and over. OSX wouldn't crash either, it just remained idle waiting on any app to pop-up and they never did.

As for the music, yeah, I love Hybrid and hybridized (dot) org :-)

[AudioSexExperience]

Awesome! I am a club DJ, buying an older powerbook for live mixing... the PB has a small Hard Drive, upgrading to a 250 GB to hold all of my music, this will help out alot, thanks!

[rocknica]

Hey man.... A friend has a powerbook g4

what harddrive did you buy? and how much GB can it take on a powerbook?

[apairnastr8]

thanks for the video, we used it while swapping in a new hardrive and we were successful. it saved us a lot of time and money and we greatly appreciate it. hope this video helps others.

[nickdotvr]

As do I! Thanks for the kind words and I may be doing this again very soon so while I'm super-happy it helped you I may be creating a "response" video with just the most important parts with the camera much closer showing much better what's happening - hopefully that will help out others even more than this video's been able to.

[159671060]

oh thank you for the answer! :)

[159671060]

HI!

wow that's awesome.!!! i wish i could make it that easier, (not fast but well done..) you know, i need to change my pwg4 AL hard disk but im just worried about the part where you take off the orange connection of the old drive and the new one. im concern about. and can you please tell me... thanks in advance. and well done!

[nickdotvr]

Sure, it's really easy, you just carefully pull it after releasing it (there are these plastic things you just push off to each side very slightly) ... I's super intuitive/straight forward and as long as you take your time doing that it'll be fine and you wont' damage the cable or thing that holds it in place any so just make sure you're not rushed for time, that's all. Good luck!

[joemellin]

nice job, am going to do one right now

thanks for your help

[nickdotvr]

anytime ;-)

[marcel911]

Who cares about the Mac. That's a nice shirt you are wearing. Can we have a view of the front too? I need a new shirt and yours looks just the job.

[nickdotvr]

This comment just made my day ;-)

[TimeKoder13]

dude where did you get the hex? I'm away from mine and can't remember where I got mine. I also remember that the size they said wasn't the right size. I think they said T7 and it was actually a T6 or T8, something like that. I might just bring my lappy with me to Home Depot but I for some reason think I got them at Target.

[nickdotvr]

I had a kit with all sizes and come to think of it you're right, I think I grabbed one but it wouldn't fit quite right, I really can't remember if I went a size up or a size down but yeah, I'll be sure to shoot you a message if I suddenly remember where I grabbed my kit from.

[jhbush1973]

You should have grounded yourself. I think you broke almost every ESD rule.

[nickdotvr]

I did, apologies that it's off-screen but I touch a plugged in grounded power supply of my desktop system just about every time I'm off-screen. Again, this wasn't meant as a detailed how-to, more of a visual here's-how-much-work-it's-gonn­a-take-to-swap-a-drive thing. Given the amount of views this has gotten since I made it I'm honestly looking forward to swapping my own MacBook Pro's drive with a SSD [the computer in this video is not mine]. I can promise a much better video with more angles.

[TehManoSteele]

FUCK MAKE IT FASTER! PLS PLS OMG WOW

[armednhammered]

No, really, I appreciate the fact that you made the video...it was just that I had a powerbook in front of me, at EXACTLY the spot where you're supposed to disconnect the top from the body, and I couldn't see how you did it!! Still, we figured it out..!

[nickdotvr]

Well, sincere apologies, certainly will do a better job with my next video of this type but I am very glad to hear that you figured it out! Did you follow ifixit step-by-step guide as well?

[armednhammered]

dude, you're standing in front of the camera at the crucial part.

[nickdotvr]

very true :-( See the description of the video and you'll understand this was never meant to be a perfect step by step visual guide even if more and more people seem to think that it is - its only purpose was to visually give people an idea of how much work they can expect to have to do if they're planning to swap the drive in their Powerbook - I looked for such a video on YouTube and found nothing before I started so I figured I'd make one ... if I did another one it'd be better for sure.

[sotaku22]

Sorry mate, but i might have to use this song in one of my vids. I don't really want to copy you, but this song is AWESOME!

[nickdotvr]

Totally cool, you found it on hybridized (dot) org, right? If not, don't settle for the so-so version off this stream, follow my directions like 6 comments down from this one and grab it, I've actually used this track in 2 videos of mine but I couldn't put the other one on here because I was afraid it could potentially put the original camera operator for it in a copyright bind. It's just that awesome of a track :-)

[andsteele]

The song is Finished Symphony by Hybrid

[nickdotvr]

correct!

[bastlenicom]

Excellent job. Thanks!

[bigmountainfan]

I'm thinking of replacing my internal PB 15 (fw 800) 1.25 soon, can you tell me exactly what kind of drive I buy? Also, how many crazy screws did you take out of that thing!?

[bullittube]

it is funny to me watching OS X install that fast i wish i could make it go that fast in real life :) lol

[PhL24]

Whats the name of the song playing? Thanks

[nickdotvr]

Since exact links don't work out so well on here, go to hybridized (dot) org and look up "Radio JJJ Mixup (2000-02-26)" -> the actual track filename is 22 - Hybrid - Finished Symphony.mp3 but feel free to check out all of the tracks as it's one sweet mix if you like that kinda sound. Hope that helps :-)

[DrMunroe]

bit hard to see when ur infront of the camera...

[nickdotvr]

very true, I didn't ever anticipate this being watched as many times as it has been and nowadays I'm kicking my ass for not having found some creative way to attach the camera to the ceiling pointing down so that more of the process is still somehow visible. Something to be keeping in mind for the next video... still thanks much for the feedback!

[DrMunroe]

do u have a tripod? alittle higher & over to the left would have been perfect...

[nickdotvr]

sadly no, not one of my own, I know it may appear as if I do if you look at any of my other projects but these are all tripods that have belonged to my friends and/or teachers and/or Media Services department of my University and for that video in particular I just balanced the camera on top of a high-tower case, which had a mid-tower case on top of it and some boxes on top of that... so yeah, you get it, not quite the "optimal" setup by any means!

[Jpalisade]

U R THE MAN- THANK U!

[nickdotvr]

Haha, U R welcome! It's not the greatest of videos but I just made it because I wanted people to see the process start to finish because it's one thing to read about it and see a few pictures and it's another thing to see it from the beginning to the end so I'm happy to be helping anyone out there who's taking on the task - not at all hard but time consuming? Oh Yeah, 45 min to 1 hour easily, maybe half an hour or a little less if you've done it before. A lot of little screws to keep track of!

[CardinalEgan]

You don't show how to undo the clip behind the CD Rom slot to get the top panel off. That is the trickiest part of opening the PB G4.

Maybe you should fix that electrical outlet when you're done with the computer... ;-)

peace

[jackieb133]

Too much shoulder and arm and not enough actual pics. should have shot from overhead.

[nickdotvr]

I completely agree with you on all of that, honestly if I could've positioned the camera above in some way I would have and working with the computer on the ground simply didn't appeal to me but you're right, if it was to be a proper instructional video it would have included some text and freeze frames too, check the video I've responded to with mine for a much better one, I did this just so that people know what to expect in terms of general amount of work that doing this involves.

[gxcad]

Decided to check your video...I see what you mean now hehe. My video is not great but certainly more useful than this one for someone wanting to use it to help them do their own swap. Again, thanks for other info you left in the comment.

[GMEN299518]

PlEASE HELP! I installed a new hard drive just as the like in the video. I loaded the OSX, when it finishes installing and restarts it displays a gray screen and reads, "You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart Button." I have done this several times to no avail. If I restart and hold the shift button it will load in safe mode. Can someone time me what I did wrong and how I can fix it, Please! Please! Please! Thank You

[nickdotvr]

I'm afraid we'll need some more information since we can't guess at this ... let me know if I'm getting this correctly - you got the new drive, went into disk utils and formated it just fine (what size was it, by the way) and past install it seems unhappy... One easy way to determine if the problem is directly related with the new drive or if ANYTHING ELSE AT ALL in your notebook is causing the trouble is to install OSX on a firewire drive and see if that boots just fine, let us know!

[VincentVega44]

Secondly...I don't have my OS disk with me. Is there an alternative method to formatting my new hard drive?

(had to be shorter than 500 characters).

[nickdotvr]

On backup tools, Apple has some but they keep pushing for a .MAC account, there are some that you have to pay money for... believe it or not this Powebook was not my own and it was the first time I'd ever done this. If you have a IDE converter you could easily hook up the drive to a desktop computer but heck, if you have an IDE converter or two nothing's to stop you from simply using Norton Ghost to image one drive over to the other (newer/bigger one) on a desktop PC. Hope all this helps! :-)

[VincentVega44]

i have a powerbook g4. and i also have an external harddrive. i purchased an internal harddrive the other day and it should becoming any day. i want to xfer all of my files to my xternal hardrive, and then replace my mac's internal hard drive. im more familiar with PC's. i know id xfer the entire C drive to the external.. but im not too sure what to do with the Mac(to get all apps music, vids etc)?

[nickdotvr]

Well... you COULD just copy everything but most importantly, if you happened to be doing Leopard (10.5.2 is pretty stable/nice) then the greatest migration tool ever is already built in and called Time Machine - that can backup to the external and then with a simple bootup from the OSX disk you can restore the time machine backup to the new drive and Boom! your All-apple solution for that works amazing.

[NEOnikolas]

In all actuality, how long was this process? How many screws are you taking out of the hard drive itself?

[nickdotvr]

it took about an hour for me to swap the drive and get the OS installing, almost two for the installation to complete and all, I didn't count the screws but what I can tell you is that I followed the guide on ifixit dot com very closely and it was dead-on [since this is the first time I'd done such a procedure - I decided to try and record everything to be able to give others a visual idea of the work involved] I hope this helps.

[vegasaaron]

dude can you help me out i want to replace my hd but the video is to fast the only part im worried about is opening it, can you show how you did that but slower, that would be a big help thank you

[taylorguy777]

what are the buttons that you press to bring up the tiger installation menu after replacing the hard drive?

[nickdotvr]

Read 2 comments down :-P I thought I was holding down option but some people are saying I must've held down C... try either, one's bound to work.

[patduz]

Hello, Nice video but I was quite worried for the Mac at the begening. A shame that we can't slowdown the operation. I was looking for the manual gide to change a HD on a PB G4 Titanium. Any ideas ?

[nickdotvr]

Hi, thanks and I could post a slowed down version, I didn't think anyone would have the patience to sit around and look at this in real time. I also should have given credit to ifixit dot com since this video is the result of following of their guide almost perfectly step-by-step... I might do another video with a voice over track and some pictures from ifixit and giving them credit at the end since their website is super-helpful.

[mangos209]

when you were booting it back up what key did you use to boot it back up... you make it look easy but i know its hard.. i got to change my hard drive on my computer because i forgot my password and dont know how to format my drive...

[nickdotvr]

I just held down the option key with the OSX CD in the drive, booted up from the CD, went into Disk Utility and Erased the drive so that I can install OSX on it. Hope that helps.

[cperalta127]

The "option" key is usually used when you want to boot from an external drive.

[cperalta127]

He held down the "C" key which tells it to boot from the CD/DVD.

[myzzdeedee]

hi, i'm new at this so i wonder if you could help me out.

- do you have to make a back up before replacing the hard drive?

- what brand would you recommend for hard drive and memory?

thanks

[nickdotvr]

I messaged you with a detailed response as the full answer ends up being far too long for a comment back on here but the short of it is, yes it's a great idea to try and backup your stuff and while I will usually pick whatever's cheapest I tend to like Western Digital's drives just because they've served me well, no ram brand recommendations, I always get whatever's got the nicest website and consumer reviews ;-)

[cperalta127]

Hitachi and Seagate are the top of the line.

[mikedub1219]

idk ive heard some bad things about seagate, but i just put in a brand new hitachi drive and its great

[andreatunes]

nice video, man.

but i hope i'll never have to do the job you did!

well.. wait a second... i can "extend" my 80GB hd... with a 120 gigs.. why not.. ;-)

[nickdotvr]

actually I intend to do another video with a MacBook Pro once the 64gig SSDs by samsung are affordable, Ryan Block from Engadget got one of these amazingly fast drives (100 Mbps write and 100 Mbps read as opposed to the 30-40 the internal drive can do and the 50-60 an eSATA drive can try to do) but right now they cost $1000 each so I think I'll have to wait until the price drops to something a bit more reasonable.

[misdemeanor]

What song is that buddy?

[nickdotvr]

Oh, I meant to throw that in the "about", it's from Radio JJJ mixup (2000-02-26) and you can find it at hybridized dot org, actual filename is 22 - Hybrid - Finished Symphony mp3. It's rather awesome, at least I love the variety within it. Hope that helps :-)

[runehj]

Are you sure it's accelerated 1000%? :)

But thanks, a friend mine (who doesn't use youtube, don't ask me why) had some use of this.

[nickdotvr]

yeah, I'm busted, 2000% during the OSX install and real-time at the ending - technically it's at 1000% speed for the rest of the time, 300fps rather than 30 but I wasn't thinking too much when making the titles. When I went to look for a video on YouTube I noticed there were only 1 or 2 and not exactly of this kind of powerbook but similar Apple models so I made this - I kinda wish I could've had a top-down view, didn't know how to attach the camera to the ceiling.

[nickdotvr]

very niice. i liike.

[nickdotvr]

I don't recall posting this, that and I'm rather sure YouTube doesn't allow you to rate your own videos so that's a little odd ... hehe, disregard previous comment folks (but feel free to let me know what you think :-P)