Laptop hard drive replacement

Whew! A major computer feat today, perhaps not for some folks but it was for me– I don’t tend to do much hardware repair or work, and this took some doing. Following these great instructions and photographs, I was able to replace the hard drive on my 12″ Macintosh Powerbook! Had the computer still been under an Apple warranty I would have gladly let a certified repair technician take care of this, but since the warranty has expired it was a matter of either paying someone or doing it myself for the cost of about $6 in tools I needed. (A very small phillips screwdriver, a small flathead screwdriver, and a 6 mm hex wrench.)

About a week ago I narrowly avoided a life-threatening complete hard drive crash (life threatening because I probably would have had a heart attack if I’d lost all my data) — my computer had been running slower and slower, and took over 4 hours to reinstall the operating system after I gave up trying to figure out how to tweak the operating system software. The 4 hour install was my big hint that something hardware-wise was going wrong. The MAJOR victory was being able to completely backup and save over 30 gigs of data from the hard drive thanks to firewire target disk mode— something I wish all Windows laptops could do as easily. Despite preaching “backup your data” frequently to others, it had been longer than I would like to admit since I had done a full backup.

So before sending the laptop to the repair shop for diagnosis, I backed everything up… and sure enough, the word from the technician was “bad hard drive.” Thankfully I had a spare 60 GB drive, and after a couple of hours, today everything is back up and running now! 🙂

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On this day..

• Managing Digital Footprints – for grandparents (March 2014) – 2014
• GeoMap: Google Maps Engine Lite Hiroshima Project – 2014
• More Minecraft Lessons from a 15 Year Old (March 2013) – 2013
• Podcast305: Science Education from a Technology Leader’s Perspective by Dr. David Thornburg – 2009
• Preliminary Report of a National Survey of School Leaders on the Use of Web 2.0 in Schools – 2009
• Science Education from a Technology Leader’s Perspective by David Thornburg – 2009
• K12 Horizon Report (CoSN 2009) – 2009
• The Challenges of Web 2.0 by Bob Martin – 2009
• Spinning history and the means of publication – 2008
• Debating Ataturk, more bans on user created content – 2007