[mkral]

My ibook G4 (800 mhz) died over the weekend. My new 12" powerbook is on the way, but now I"m wondering what to do with the ibook. I can salvage the power adapter, I suppose, and maybe put the airport card on ebay, but aside from that, I have a pretty much worthless ibook (the hard drive died) When I tried ti fire it up last to transfer files & all, the hard drive was screeching loudly, so I turned it back off.)

The problem that I have is that all of my data is on there, finances, business finances, emails, passwords, etc. No way I'd sell it with all of that data potentially floating around. Places like drivesavers seem to be able to recover just about anything these days.

Any ideas about what to do with the ibook? Should I just try to take it apart & break the hard drive?

[Will C]

If that was my iBook I would replace the harddrive but see if putting the faulty harddrive in an external enclosure might have more success salvaging the data. Sometimes (not very often) drives can recover if orientated diffrent ways or given the odd knock (percussive maintenance). Heads can 'stick' sometimes and a knock can shock them free again. Of course this can also kill the drive.

If you are concerend about the data on it, remove it and crush it in a vice or open it up and scratch the platter surface or something.

Your iBook will still sell on ebay even without a harddrive - you're not in the UK by any chance are you?......

[Will C]

I ought to add that drives can appear to fail when they are full - the OS ends up with disk cache space which is severly fragmented and the drive has to spend most of its time moving the head from place to place making a lot of noise, or it may have insufficient space for cache - if you can target boot the iBook from another mac you may be able to recover the data and free up some space on it.

[amazing]

If I had an old iBook with a bad HD, I'd download the pbfixit.com guide and replace the HD. Can't mess it up any more than it already is? HDs are pretty cheap nowadays and then you could sell it or donate it to relative and/or student, etc...

[broxy5]

..or send it to me. I'll even pay the shipping.

[mkral]

Thanks for the replies. I'm pretty sure it wasn't a full hard drive. I had about 25 of the 60 original gigs still unused. I'll try the percussive maintenance thing, at this point it can't hurt. I"ve tried to boot it in Target disc mode, but that didn't work.

Anyways, afraid I'm not in the UK, thanks for the help!

[wataru]

If all that's wrong with it is the hard drive, then it's not trashed. Either replace the hard drive yourself or, if that's beyond your skills, sell it to someone who can.

[amazing]

If the complex replacement of the HD is beyond your tech skills, you can also price out having an Apple Service Provider replace the HD. Several years ago, I was quoted $80 to replace the HD in a 12" AlPB, so prices may have changed--but that's not too much for resurrecting the iBook.

[mkral]

Sweet! Thanks for the heads up. I"ll take a look at having it replaced.