TiBook 1GHz drive upgrade woes

Hi, eberls, and welcome to Apple Discussions. You may have damaged your Powerbook's delicate hard drive flex cable when removing it, or failed to press its connector down firmly enough against the logic board for it to make good contact after reassembly. It snaps softly into place when properly connected. Whether the cable is damaged or just not making contact, it's undoubtedly at the root of your problem. Check the connection, and if that doesn't resolve the problem you can replace the cable inexpesnively. Try these parts vendors:

http://www.pbparts.com (parts and repair work)
http://www.dttservice.com (parts and repair work)
http://www.powerbookresq.com (parts and repair work)
http://www.tekserve.com (parts and repair work)
http://www.welovemacs.com (parts and used equipment)
http://www.ifixit.com (parts and excellent, illustrated online take-apart instructions)

Prices for the same parts vary WIDELY, so check around.

That's good news, eberls. Thanks for posting back with the outcome.

Hey Ewww, this is if you get this post from me. check this out if you can help me. I have a PB Tibook 1ghz that I bought on ebay. The computer runs great and has a 160gb wd scorpio HD in it. I also got my hands on a Transcend 64GB SSD (solid state multi level cell hd) along with the usb to ide connector. Basically I want to copy everything from my existing hard drive to this new one via usb. Hopefully from what I was told already that this is the best route to go as far as copying the complete hard drive.

I already know that this way is very time consuming as far as copying, I have already tried to copy complete drive to new one using Super Duper program. It did make a complete copy to the new drive but the new drive won't boot up on it's own. It basically took my PB 6 and a half hours to copy the 24 gigs worth that are on the internal hard drive to the new one. Time does not matter as I am a newbie to the world of macs and that the PB is not my main computer I use, even tho I would like to make it my main labtop that I would use on a daily basis. If I'm thinking correctly I have nothing to lose and everything to gain by using this new hard drive (less power, faster speed, and not to mention I don't believe I ever have to worry about the drive actually going Kaput on me since there are no moving parts inside of it).

In any case, I read a post and reply that you had left for somebody else. The ribbon connector is good, and knowing how delicate they are to break, I also have taken the time to remove it very slowly, not only because I don't want to damage the cable but also not trying to bend any of the pins on neither drive.
I used a very small straight edge screwdriver and very slowly pried each side of a little at a time until I have enough room to put a straight piece of this plastic strip thing I have to remove the ribbon equally on both sides at the same time. I believe, as I have found out in the past that patience is the key to success in all of this.

Anyhoo, If you have any sugestions of telling me what is the best approach of completing this mission at hand, any of your knowledge would be greatly appreciated. thanx again, have a great day, Jason

Hi, Jason. You can't boot the Powerbook in OS X to any USB device: this is a hardware limitation. So if the SSD is still connected via USB, that's one good reason why it isn't bootable. Assuming you instructed SuperDuper to make the clone bootable (I think that's a default setting in SD), it will have created a bootable software configuration on the SSD, so the only obstacle in your way now is the USB connection. In that case, the next step is to install the SSD inside the Powerbook, which I presume you intend to do anyway. Once it's installed, you'll be able to see whether it boots properly. I expect it will.

The Tibook only has slow USB 1.1 ports, and they're just not a practical way to connect any external storage device for regular use. Your very tedious one-time-only data transfer has already made you aware of this. So if you intend to use your 160GB drive for external storage and/or backing up the internal SSD, you'll want to buy a FireWire enclosure for it. A FireWire enclosure will enable you to boot to the external drive, and to read from and write to it faster than even USB2 would allow. Here's one good inexpensive enclosure on Ebay for only $26 plus shipping. If you're not keen on buying from Ebay, here's another well-regarded enclosure:

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other%20World%20Computing/MOTGFW400/

EDIT: It now occurs to me that you said nothing about formating the SSD before you cloned to it. Did you use Disk Utility to format the SSD in Mac OS Extended format before cloning to it? If not, it's probably still in the Windoze format that was undoubtedly put on it at the factory, and it can't be used as an OS X startup disk in that format. If that's the situation, unfortunately you'll have to reformat it and then repeat the cloning process.

Message was edited by: eww