[mrkunda]

Hi,

I have a 15 Powerbook G4 and looking to upgrade the 60G hard drive to 120G or
higher. What are my options? I looked at Seagate and Hitachi drives, but not sure
if there is a specific one that matches with my Powerbook.

Any ideas/pointers to find the right one are appreciated.

Thanks,
ram

[mduell]

IDE, EIDE, ATA, PATA, ATA-5, ATA-6... all the same thing. And the type you need.
Depending on how old your PowerBook is, it may have a 137GB drive limit due to the older controller.
I like Seagate drives because they come with a 5 year warranty (vs 3 or even 1 for most other brands) and have been reliable for me. Prices range from $80 for 100GB to $120 for 160GB.
Directions on how to replace the drive can be found on ifixit.com.

[tinkered]

Try using ifixit (http://www.ifixit.com/) or OWC (http://www.macsales.com/) for upgrade guides.

As for brand. Frankly, Hitachi and Seagate are both good brands, I would buy either. I would buy a 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm drive.

[mrkunda]

Mark and tinkered - thanks for your advice. I will check out the websites.

ram

[caleach]

We purchased the above drive today to install into a 12" PB 1.33 ghz. We got it installed OK but when attempting to run disk utility to ensure the drive was formatted correctly the utility was not recognizing the drive.

Someone told us about jumper settings and there is a picture on the label of the drive itself but we cannot find where to check this.

Has anyone else had this experience? Are the jumper settings inside the drive and do I need to open it up?

Hopefully it's something stupid that's easy to fix.

We've got the laptop apart on the kitchen table and hope we can get it back together soon.

Thanks

Steve

[caleach]

Well, I took the computer apart, seached high and low for jumpers and couldn't find anything. This inspite of the fact that there was a jumper diagram on the label on the HD. I put it back together, which I am now getting pretty good at, and tried again to install the OS. Disk Utility finally recognized the drive, I erased it and everything looked fine. Now when I go to install the OS it tells me that I cannot install Mac OS X on this volume.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Steve

[caleach]

I am going to post my progress for the benefit of those who are checking this out and may also be facing the same problems. I restarted the computer, selecting the CD as the startup disk and now it both sees the drive and is allowing me to install the OS. I am a little concerned about the inconsistency here but will go through process and let you all know what happens. For the life of me I don't know what changed between the first time I installed it, when it wouldn't recognize the drive, and the second time when it did.

Stay tuned......

[peeb]

So what happened in the end?