Unfortunately, this wasn’t an upgrade. About a month ago, Kristin’s 12″ Powerbook suffered a hard drive crash after she was working it with some heavy duty photoshop work (I think she basically killed it because it got so hot that the bearings in the drive expanded, freezing the drive.

Thankfully, this was the “best” kind of crash, and the service we used (Eco Data Recovery, down in Florida) did a superb job of recovering the data. I went with them in large part because they offered a fixed-rate price instead of the variable sliding scale employed by most other data recovery firms (so that once they have your hard drive, they can basically ransom your data back to you… 🙁 ). But dealing with Eco Data Recovery was a pleasure from start to finish, the loaded Kristin’s data back onto a nice shiny new Lacie 250 GB external drive I had drop-shipped there.

So, if you need to take apart your own 12″ Powerbook, I can definitely recommend the following tutorial with pictures:

Reader Article on PowerBook G4 12in Hard Drive Upgrade

Difficulty: For advanced users. (You assume all risk in doing this; if something gets damaged in the process, the Apple warranty won’t cover it.)

It was somewhat tricky, but mostly just took a long time. I put the screws into little numbered sandwich bags (6 bags total) to keep track of how to put it all back together.

Anyways, hopefully in about a week we’ll have Kristin’s lappy back good as used… 🙂