I love it when I save $1000 or so. :-)
I have an Apple Titanium PowerBook, circa October 2001. Not the latest and greatest, to be sure, but perfectly fine for my main portable tasks: email and 'Net access, reading and writing blogs, plus presentations both desktop and projector-driven. The machine shows a wee bit of wear on its case, having been around the world several times and having been plugged into mains and VGA cables from Singapore to Sweden and back again.
Recently, however, the TiBook has had trouble waking from sleep mode. The screen would come back but the cursor would not appear and neither the keyboard nor trackpad seemed to work. The only way to revive the machine was a complete cold restart, and that often made the machine forget it had a system installed on the hard disk, and thus fail to boot. But if I cold started the machine, then shut it down and waited an hour or so, it would boot normally and all would be fine, at least until I tried to sleep it and wake it up again.
I tried everything I know about Macs (which is not inconsiderable, given that the TiBook is my sixth PowerBook): permissions repair, software disk repair, PRAM reset, Open Firmware boot and reset, starting in OS 9, fresh install of OS X, reverting to an earlier version of OS X. Nada. Which convinced me it was a hardware problem.
I searched Apple's PowerBook discussions board and found a well-populated thread about similar odd problems, but the symptoms were slightly different. Rather than give up and either buy a new machine or send it to Apple for repair, I decided to replace the hard drive. After all, the main symptom was that the machine couldn't find the system on the drive. So I ordered a new drive from newegg.com and installed it according to PBFixIt's excellent guides, and crossed my fingers.
I'm happy to report that it's been a week and all appears well. Lots of sleep/wake cycles and not a single one missed yet. To double check, I installed the old drive in an external case and hooked it up via firewire. The drive works well, most of the time. But if it gets warm and I unmount it, it will not remount until its had a chance to cool down a bit.
All's well that ends well. And the bonus is that I now have another 30GB or so of room on the TiBook.
Posted by Jack at December 2, 2004 09:07 AM | TrackBack