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iBook Surgery

This past weekend I cracked open an iBook for the second time.
My niece’s iBook died last year in the fall. Didn’t seem to be a power problem, but would NOT boot from the internal drive or a startup CD. She was told that fixing it would be mega expensive and probably wouldn’t get her data back. No worries though because she had everything backed up to an external drive. The real problem was being without a machine. A replacement was more expensive (30%?) where she lives (Dublin) so she waited for a visit from her dad. He delivered her new macbook, and brought the ibook back for me to ‘tinker with’ to see if maybe I could breath some life back into it.

So the macbook made it to Ireland, but before she had a chance to transfer her backup... the backup drive died. Hoo boy!

The work stuff she just had to rebuild, but there was a fair bit of personal stuff (correspondence , photos, etc) that she was really hoping I might be able to retrieve.
I finally had some time (and was able to clear an operating room) so I set to work pulling the drive. (the drive was making noises like it wanted to spin, but just couldn’t)

here is a little movie of the iBook turning into screws and guts.




Whew!

I connected the bare drive to the laptop I was using for instructions, slapped it around a bit to make the platters spin... put it in the freezer.... smacked it some more... and then...




SUCCESS!
I'm pretty sure I was able to retrieve everything (all the data I found seemed pretty solid)
(a bad drive motor? or power supply?)

That mess of plastic and metal is now running again with a brand new drive.




And my niece is looking forward to the Irish postal service delivering a bunch of DVDs with her new found data. Kinda exciting, eh?