Huge water spill, question about transferring hard drives....Please help!

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Level 1

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Huge water spill, question about transferring hard drives....Please help!

This is a bit long, but if anybody has any advice I would greatly, greatly appreciate it!
I have an iBook G4, and long story short, a roommate decided to lock our cat in the same room with it, and...well, it was soaked in cat urine for several hours and won't turn on or respond in any way. I'm a student from the US studying in Australia, so I had my parents purchase a used PowerBook G4 and send it over because I needed something to use in the meantime, and was told I could transfer everything. The PowerBook was also advertised as having 80 GB of memory so I thought I was upgrading (my iBook only had 40), but it only has 640 MB and really old versions of everything (10.2.8), with difficulty updating anything. I was going to wait until I got home to sort out transferring all of my programs and everything, but because the PowerBook has so little of what I need, I was hoping I could figure out the process now.
I know I'll have to pay someone to do everything, but before I make an expensive appointment, I was wondering....
1) Is it possible to transfer everything, including memory and all of my applications and documents, from the iBook G4 to the PowerBook G4?
2) If I can only transfer applications, documents, etc., and not memory, how much is it to purchase more memory?
3) Any idea of the time/parts involved so I can get an idea of how much it'll cost?
Essentially I just want to switch the content of my old computer into a new body, but I'm just not sure how compatible they are/how screwed I am.
Thanks for any help!

Posted on Mar 24, 2008 2:06 AM

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Answer 1

spudnuty

Level 5

7,128 points

Mar 24, 2008 7:13 AM in response to Kayelle41620

Hey Kayelle and Welcome to Apple Discussions,
Here's a mod of an earlier post of mine.
"Whenever any liquid/water is spilled on the iBook especially in the keyboard area which affords a direct path to the mother board, all power should be immediately removed from the iBook. In fact I might go so far as to say you should immediately pull the power plug and remove the battery, crashing the computer, because that would be better than causing an electrical problem on the logic board.

In other words:

Crashing iBook - worst case scenerio - corrupted system - reinstall software
probability ~ 5%

Water on the board - worst case scenerio - damaged logic board replacement cost
$300 depending on model plus labor - probability - 80%.

So once all power is off the computer it will have to be completely disassembled down to the board level and all parts will have to be inspected for signs of water. Even the tiniest drop will cause disaster. This would be especially true in the area of and under the larger LSI chips and surface mount chips. These sit very low to the board and can wick water underneath them very easily. In the case of the graphics chip, CPU chips which are ball grid mounted, there are hundreds of connections under these chips, separated by less that 1 mm. Water wicking into that area would need to be blown out with compressed air and then the board should be placed in a drying oven.
It could still take weeks or months to dry out naturally.

In the case of cat urine the board should be immediately soaked/sprayed with/in distilled/deionized water to remove all traces of the urine. Then dried as above.

The PowerBook was also advertised as having 80 GB of memory so I thought I was upgrading (my iBook only had 40), but it only has 640 MB and really old versions of everything (10.2.8), with difficulty updating anything.

Yes people often confuse hard drive space with RAM. But 640 is not bad if the OS was updated to 10.3.2-.9 or 10.4.3-.11.

1) Is it possible to transfer everything, including memory and all of my applications and documents, from the iBook G4 to the PowerBook G4?

It would have been easy if the iBook was able to go into "target" mode. Now you'll have to pull the hard drive and put it into an external case to do that.

Good luck. BTW what did it cost to ship that PowerBook from the states?

Richard

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Answer 2

Kayelle41620 Author

Level 1

0 points

Mar 24, 2008 8:08 AM in response to spudnuty

Thanks so much for the quick reply. I will definitely see if I can have the hard drive pulled and put into an external case. And you're right; it actually does have 80 GB, I was just looking at the "about this mac" and didn't realize that the hard drive's memory is separate. I do have one additional question for you if you're willing.... The new(ish) PowerBook is running on version 10.2.8, and I'm having difficulty updating to anything newer. I have attempted downloading a few more current versions, but as everything builds on itself, I have to start with version 10.3 which I am unable to find. Even the combined 10.3.1, 10.3.5, etc. versions will not start with 10.3 missing, and it doesn't seem to be anywhere on the apple download site, or anywhere else online that I can find. Ideally I'd like to have it updated to 10.4.11, but I'm not sure if I have to download every step in between, or if there actually is a way to download a combined version from what I already have.
Oh, and the cost to Australia via Express was around $55. Thanks again for the reply!

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