I thought it would be a good idea to upgrade my hard disk in my Powerbook 17″. Seemed like a good idea at the time, anyway. So, I bought a Hitachi Travelstar 60GB 7200RPM Fluid Bearing drive, which to all intents and purposes is silent.

I proceeded to use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the disk, checked that I could boot off it, and proceeded to disassemble my Powerbook.

First problem, you need a T9 6-pointed screwdriver. You won’t get the machine apart without one. Oops. Okay, so tripped out to Akihabara where I found a store with the right screwdriver. Excellent.

Come back to work, pull everything apart (was pretty easy and logical – the Apple Powerbook ALs seem to be well made) and swap the disks. No problem.

Put everything back together again, plug in the power, and try to boot.

DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME KIDS

No good! Doesn’t recognise the disk! Argh. No matter, start up with install CD and just install a fresh OS. I have all my files on the other disk and I have a Firewire caddy for it, so I can get the files off.

Fresh install of Panther. Won’t update. Hmm. Log in as root, try updating, no problems. OK, must try fixing permissions.

Plug in old internal drive into the firewire port … nothing happens … “Unrecognised disk, wanna format it?” NO!. GACK! ok. Calm down.

I do some checks with fsck, pdisk, other command line tools that I’m familiar with. Doesn’t look like there is a partition table. Great.

I tossed around the idea of recreating the partition table, but wasn’t keen on the idea, what if I get it wrong? No, better that I check out what tools are available. Am now using Data Rescue frmo Prosoft, to scan everything. See if it comes back with my files. If so, great. If not, poo.