[cswann67]

alright. I have a dual usb iBook with a 30 gig harddrive. the screen is shot so i have upgraded to a new 12" iBook. My question is this: is it possible to remove the hard drive from the old iBook and use it as an external hardrive?? any type of shell with firewire port or something like that?? any help would be greatly apprecciated.

caleb swann

[drive-thru]

Yes, I recently changed the hard drive in my iBook.
This Guide will show you how to open up the iBook enough in order to get to the drive. Make sure you label the screws (wrap them in tape and tape them to a piece of paper listing where they came from), although this is not so important if the iBook is dead, but you may want to put it on eBay for spares.
You will need a FireWire (or USB 2) enclosure for the disk. It needs to hold a 2.5" disk rather than the standard desktop 3.5" disk. I have a few FireLite enclosures from SmartDisk which I put disks into (they only sell them with disks already in on their website), but you can probably pick up an empty enclosure at an online store, if not eBay.

My advice would be to get a firewire enclosure (remember it is 2.5 inch) as it can run on power from the iBook and doesn't need an adaptor.

Anyone else know of any good enclosures/places to buy them?

[cswann67]

thanks very much good sir. Will i really be able to sell well on ebay?

[drive-thru]

I don't know about selling well, but you might find someone looking for spares (such as a logic board) to repair their iBook. If you're not planning on doing anything with the iBook then you might as well see what you can get for it.

If the old iBook has an Airport card sell that separately, Apple stopped making them and they're going for about £70-80 on eBay over here.