So I got the new hard drive today. Installing it took about half an hour, which includes reading the manual to make sure I was doing things correctly. I bought the drive from MCE (Mac Components Engineered). They're a bit pricey but they test what they can and build their own addons, have good (for hardware) docs and include all you need. The drive came with an instruction manual, tools to take apart the powerbook, and an anti-static wrist strap which I didn't use. I've never used an anti-static strap, which may account for a couple of problems that I've run into, but if you're relative careful there should be no worry about destroying your equipment.

The manual covers taking apart iBooks, as well as different PowerBook models. Lots of diagrams and easy instructions, as taking apart an Apple product is generally easy in the first place. Take out the keyboard, heatsink, unscrew the hard drive, pull it out then put in your new hard drive and put everything back together. Strangely, the new hard drive (from IBM) sounds like it has a component loose inside when I turn it over. Worried, I kept going and hoped that it wasn't anything unusual.

The old hard drive I put into an MCE Datashuttle, which allows the drive to be used via a PC Card slot. Again, a bit pricey but it's much easier than copying all the data to a third hard drive and then copying it back. You can boot off of the PC Card slot, although it's quite a bit slower than IDE, topping out at about 800KB a second. It's kind of big and bulky, although not heavy unless you include the optional power brick (it's supposed to be able to draw power from the PC Card slot although I had a slight problem and didn't try to debug it). Comes with a carrying case, manual, and a screwdriver with the screws you need to install the hard drive.

I put in the Mac OS 9 CD and used the Disk Setup program to partition the new drive. The Disk Setup program is better than the old days, when it only worked with Apple hard drives and only allowed you to make one Mac OS partition. I quickly created a 6GB, 2 4GB, and a 3GB partition, the rest of the space was used for the formatting data. Formatting only took a minute, because it didn't physically format the disk (it already was formatted for the Mac OS).

Install OS 9 on the first partition. Copy the contents of the old drive to the second partition. Move all user data to the third partition. Reboot off of the OS 8.6 partition and see what dies. The first thing being Desktop Picture Changer, which can't find the desktop picture folder so it installs some sort of invisible picture. The Finder becomes intolerably slow, and it takes me a few minutes to remember that it's because it has the phantom picture as the desktop picture. Go to the Appearance Control Panel and remove the picture to restore performance.

Have I mentioned how physically small the hard drive is? I'm used the 3.5" hard drive that you find on a desktop machine. The notebook drive is tiny in comparison, about 1/4 of the size. And it's very quiet too, not that my old drive was noisy. Hopefully there's no hidden gotcha like it runs hotter and will overheat the PowerBook (which does have more RAM and that definitely makes it run hotter).

The only problem I've experienced is with SoundApp. I use it to play MP3s so I don't have to have the CDs around. Now the songs skip occassionally, usually with any sort of disk access. Even when changing windows it's skip, but after a startup it runs fine for a half hour. A little annoying, and something I may have to investigate more once I've finished upgrading to Mac OS 9.