Replacing Powerbook G4 15" Aluminium 80Gb PATA drive with 40Gb drive?

Question

Level 1

9 points

Replacing Powerbook G4 15" Aluminium 80Gb PATA drive with 40Gb drive?

Having already accidentally purchased a 3.5" drive to replace a failed Powerbook PATA/ATA HDD, I now want to double check that THIS might do the trick! http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/330523013972

Thanks.

PowerBook G4 1.67 15" (Al) 1.67 GHz PowerPC 7447a (G4)

Intro. January 31, 2005 Disc. October 19, 2005

Order M9677LL/A Model A1106 (EMC 2029)

Family 15-Inch 1.67/1.5 ID PowerBook5,6

RAM 512 MB VRAM 64 MB

Storage 80 GB (5400 RPM) Optical 8X "SuperDrive"

Posted on Sep 7, 2015 3:01 AM

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Answer 1

Allan Jones

Level 9

78,794 points

Sep 10, 2015 3:43 AM in response to digitaltoast

The specs appear fine. This part bothers me:

Toshiba shipped a bunch of 40GB 2.5" drives in the early 2000's that simply did not hold up. A friend had two older PowerBooks updated with Toshiba 40GB drives and both drives failed in less than three years. I replaced them with WD Scorpios and they are still working fine--10 years later!

See if the vendor will let you specify a brand.

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Answer 2

digitaltoast Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 10, 2015 3:48 AM in response to Allan Jones

Thank you. Well, the drive arrived, I fitted it, formatted, partitioned and tested.

And now the situation is EXACTLY the same as with the old drive. Laptop boots (took a few goes to install), but then after a while, I get the beachball.

And although the top menu responds, nothing else does. I can select restart, but it won't. Only a hard crashdown sorts it.

The disk can be checked for both errors and permissions, and passes just fine, but it does take a LONG time. Same as with the old disk.

For example, it started downloading updates, got to 6%, then I got the beachball.

I'm beginning to think it might be network adaptor related, even though I have tried both LAN and Wifi.

My original post is here, but the disk error may be misleading now.

PowerBook G4 "The underlying task reported failure on exit (-9972)"

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Answer 3

digitaltoast Author

Level 1

9 points

Sep 10, 2015 4:34 AM in response to digitaltoast

Well, it's been almost an hour now since I tried changing the network adaptor from DHCP to fixed IP, fixed DNS servers, no IPV6.

I don't know which it was that fixed it, but it's been running perfectly all that time. Used to not last even a minute.

How very frustrating!

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