Q: Will a PowerBook 190 hard drive work in a PowerBook 100?
I have a PowerBook 100 with a dead drive. It's my first laptop, and I want to keep it for posterity.
I have a PowerBook 190 with a good drive. It means nothing to me.
I've been trying to find out if the drives are swappable, but the interwebs are failing me. (Or perhaps I'm failing at the interwebs.)
Help me Apple Discussions Community. You're my only hope!
Posted on Jul 16, 2015 11:52 PM
From what the datebase at http://mactracker.ca shows, among vintage/obsolete PowerBooks,
the PowerBook 190/190s utilizes an IDE kind of hard drive interface technology while older 100
shows an earlier SCSI 40-pin. This slight database does not tell the voltage requirement or
the compatibility of one set of parts to the other machine, either way. They are different enough.
Another place to look for information (since mactracker is a download application) would be
online at http://everymac.com since they have a fairly good and accessible info base there.
On the face of it, the hard drives do not appear to be interchangeable; and I don't see a reference
so far, if there had been an adaptable way to exchange them internally. Some models of older
portable Mac were able to be adapted to use later technologies such as camera memory/flash
cards instead of hard drives. However what I'd seen about that did not go into the vintage of yours.
Perhaps someone will reply who actually has these two models and has restored some. Another
site with a little bit of info online had been http://lowendmac.com yet going forward there's less...
See if these LowEndMac pages about the early PoweBook 100. 190, & etc. help: (note links do fail)
http://lowendmac.com/pb/index.shtml
http://lowendmac.com/2014/powerbook-history-before-the-g3/
PS: the answer may be in the information found in this last link.
Good luck & happy computing!
Posted on Jul 17, 2015 12:18 AM