iBook Surgery - Swapping Hard Disk

A few weeks ago, I have finally upgraded the hard disk on my iBook. The HD is Fujitsu 40GB 5,400rpm. I also bought a new home for the original Toshiba 10GB HD. This HD enclosure is light-weight, screw-less, and sexy. But before I replaced the harddisk, I have to clone the disk first. I put the Fujitsu in the mini-enclosure and used Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) to clone the disk. CCC is simple and a easy-to-use utility. For me, it is a must-have utility for system upgrade and preparation. Before using it, I needed to create a HFS+ (w/Journal) for the new HD from Disk Utility. After all, I started CCC, and the cloning process took some while from my slow iBook.

After cloning, the real surgery began. I followed the instructions from xlr8yourmac.com's overclocking guide and this article to dissemble it. There are many different kinds of screws, so extra care must be paid for that. After an hour of fighting and struggling, I finally dissembled it. (The hardest part is to tear the plastic bottom off the body. It requires a mix of hard and soft force.) The harddisk swapping was uneventful, except that I had to find some extra screws left from my ATX case to fix the new HD to mounting plates. The next difficult part was not to re-assemble it, but to find the right home for those screws. I followed the mentioned articles, but sometimes I couldn't make it right. After a few trial-n-error, all screws were tightened in right place (I guess!). Install the Airport and keyboard back, and press power button - the classic "Dong" chime was heard - I was relieved. The new HD booted up Jaguar as usual the old one did. I even noticed some speed improvement, and it is a little less noisy. At that stage, 2.5 hours had been past.

The next thing, of course, was to check the system. I was very delighted that everything work as before. I also put the old 10GB HD back to the enclosure. It was no doubt that it mounts successfully. And as expected, there was no problem to boot directly from it.

The next few days, I upgraded it to Panther, and installed XCode, iLife '04 and Jam Pack as well. Unfortunately, my iBook was only capable to play a few tracks in GarageBand. Moreover, the new disk was consumed rapidly, the Finder now shows there are 22.5 GB left.