Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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Hard Drive breakage¶
266 words
Until recently I had been lucky enough to never have suffered from hard drive failures, which many people are running into these days. But, finally!, last week the kitchen PowerBook stopped working and after a quick check this wasn’t due to my flatmates pressing the wrong buttons on the machine but to its hard drive making clicking noises.
As the machine is only used for web, video, and music, it’s luckily not a real problem that I don’t have a backup of it. The main issue was that its installation DVDs seem to be at my parents’ house and had to be mailed to me first, as I seem to have Intel-only installation DVDs around my place these days.
Unfortunately Aluminium G4 PowerBooks not only look blatantly mediocre but also suffer from a rather user-hostile design which puts a gazillion little screws between you and the hard drive you need to exchange. Low-points of that ordeal were needing an extra tiny Inbus (hexagonal) screw driver and all other screws being simple Philips ones despite me now having a great Torx-8 screwdriver for the Torx screws which Apple tend to use for fixing hard drives in computers otherwise.
All that said, replacing the hard drive in my plastic MacBook is significantly easier and quicker. It doesn’t require me to carefully collect the screws of each step, so I can reassemble everything again later on.
Now I’m thinking it may be interesting to disassemble the broken hard drive but I could only remove its logic board. I’d need a Torx 6, I think, to open the case itself.
