Tim’s previous Mac, an iBook G4, had an unpleasant habit of exhibiting display anomalies and freezing about 5 minutes after booting, and the conclusion Steve and I came to was that the fan had stopped spinning (confirmed by iStat Pro, very quickly before it froze again).

Unsure of whether the fan or the logic board was the problem, I decided to fix up the old PowerBook for Tim instead of repairing the iBook just now. I also got my first experience putting thermal paste on a heat sink. Kinda weird.

After the PowerBook was all back together, I had to figure a way to get Tim’s data off the iBook—difficult, since it wouldn’t run for more than 5 minutes at a time. I would have to at least remove the hard drive from the iBook (a host upon which to be decided later).

I had no idea how hard it was to get a hard drive out of an iBook. NOT USER SERVICEABLE. I had to take a million screws out, and remove both sides of the case (front and back). Much more difficult than a PowerBook (and, I assume, a pre-unibody MacBook Pro).

Once the hard drive was out (and the various innards of the iBook spread all over the kitchen table), my first idea was to just stick it in my MacBook temporarily, since it’s INSANELY easy to swap the hard drive in a MacBook. Turns out Ultra ATA drives don’t work in a Serial ATA MacBook.

The second idea (after verifying it on EveryMac.com) was to put the drive in my old Power Mac G4. For some reason that didn’t work, even though it’s also Ultra ATA. Different spacing on the pins or something (puzzling). By this point Tim and Dani were fidgeting about, wanting to get on the road, since they had a 3-hour drive to Mt. Vernon.

I explored various other solutions, such as booting the iBook with exposed logic board and hoping the improved air circulation kept it going sans fans long enough to copy stuff off. I also suggested to myself that I could connect various computers (and/or external hard drives) together in FireWire Target Disk Mode, but only the Power Mac had enough FireWire ports to handle it, and all my FireWire cables were in the closet in the bedroom, in front of which Drew was sleeping, on a cot (since Company had taken over his room for the weekend).

Also briefly reflected upon the fact that either a) a working FireWire hub, or b) one of these would have solved everything.

Anyway, the final solution (which worked) was to throw the drive in Jennifer’s PowerBook for a bit while SuperDuper copied everything perfectly over to the new computer, impressing Tim.