Oh the time I have wasted on this iBook.

Alright. So here is the deal.

A little while back, my grandmother got an iBook.

Now I know what some of you might be saying, "This is 2010,  why did she just get an iBook?"

Well the reason why she got one, is because my grandpa was at some auction and remembered that my family uses Macs and likes them so he decided to buy one.

My grandmother called me over and I took a look at it. It had Tiger preinstalled on it, it had 1GB of RAM. Not too shabby for a 2005 computer. The hard drive was a little small (only had 40GB). I told her that I would upgrade it for her and teach her how to use it.

Later that week, I went to Staples with Mitchell to look at laptops because he was going to get one for his birthday and wanted my input. While at staples I also decided to look for some bargains on computer parts for my grandmothers laptop. I was looking at the hard drives and realized that they didn't have any PATA hard drives on display, so I asked one of the sales clerks if she could check out prices on PATA hard drives. She left and came back 5 minutes later with a slightly surprised look on her face. She told me that the cheapest one she had was for thirteen dollars. I didn't think much of it, but then she told me the capacity on that one was 250GB. That was a pretty sweet deal so I bought the drive. I took the laptop home and decided to place the drive into the computer.

I went to ifixit.com and looked up the instruction manual on getting to the hard drive.

It was one of the hardest things I have done. I mean, I had to almost dismantel the entire thing and... I broke it.

I got to step 31, and followed the picture directions without scrolling down first... (dumb me) And I messed up with step 32. I yanked the socket clear out of the Logicboard. I kept working, and replaced the hard drive with the new one. Well, later in a panic I tried to superglue the socket back on, because I thought that the metal touching the metal would be enough... it was not...

I went to bed that night, broken, sad, and stressed. The following day, I tried to find someone who could help me, I called my dad, I called a couple of my friends and they were of little help but not enough to get it fixed and not tell my grandmother. I called my grandma and told her about the situation and she was very understanding.
I decided to try the tech department at my University. They told me that they hadn't soldered a piece back onto a Logicboard in like 10 years. But I found out that there was someone who, aside from working for the IT department at school, also did small repairs from home. I got his contact info and he said he would help me.

Later that day, I took the iBook to his house. He tried to take it apart. He didn't have the right tools so he said that he would take care of it the following day. I also gave him a 1GB stick of RAM to put into the iBook. When I got the computer back, it was turing on, however, the trackpad was dead. I didn't worry about that too much because my grandmother doesn't ever use the track pad and has multiple computer mice that she can just hook up to this computer.

Another weird thing, was that the iBook was displaying that it had 1.5GB of RAM. I figured out later that there is a built in slot of 512MB RAM in the computer so coupled with the 1GB it gave it 1.5GB.

Over the weekend. I installed OS X Tiger back onto the machine. However, much to my surprise, there isn't a whole lot of software that still works on the good ol' 10.4.11. So, I had to get Leopard on this machine.

This also proved to be very difficult. I had previously made a disk image of my Leopard install disk, however,  I have no idea where the real disk had gone and I had no DL-DVD-R disks which are required for an OS installation on a Mac.

I did some research online and found that there were several ways to install Leopard without a disk. One was to use a firewire cord (unfortunately, I didn't have one of these) the second was to use USB booting. I know that Apple does not official support USB booting, but I found that there was a way. For some odd reason (perhaps because of my firmware version or because I was using an iPod as the USB device) I was unable to do a USB boot. I felt broken and thought there was nothing I could do.

Then I had an epiphany.

The 2005 HP Pavilion that we have at home has a Recovery Partition on it's built in hard drive. So all I had to do was create a Recovery Partition on the 250GB hard drive in the iBook. I used the method that I used to try USB booting.

Method:
1. On the iBook, I reinstalled Tiger

2. Before starting the installation, I used Disk Utility on the install disk to make a 10GB partition on the hard drive. Since the iBook has a G4 processor, I made sure to make the partition in the Apple Partition Map format.

3. Install Tiger on the larger partition

4. I connected my MacBook Pro to the iBook using an ethernet cable and turned on sharing options so that I could access the files on my MacBook Pro.

5. I found the Leopard DMG and mounted it.

6. Open Disk Utility

7. Eject the DMG

8. Click on Images

9. Scan Images for Restore

10. Selected my Leopard dmg as the source

11. Then I selected the 10GB partition I had created earlier as the destination of recovery

12. Click restore.

This process took a while. But when it finished, I opened system preferences and chose the 10GB partition as the boot partition.

When hit restart the computer turned off. When it turned back on, I could hear a ton of hard drive activity, almost like a CD being read. It booted into the Leopard installation almost seamlessly. The installation took a lot less time that the computer predicted, it estimated an hour and 5 minutes but only took like 35 minutes.

After Leopard installed I opened System Preferences and made sure that the small partition was not going to be the boot partition, then ran Software Update.

Everything is working fine now. Leopard is a tad sluggish at times but that's because this laptop is old. After I turned off icon previews, it became a little bit faster, and using Camino as a web browser helped a lot too.

Currently the iBook is being used as a machine for Skyping and organizing photos, so it gets the job done.

For anyone out there who wants to try to create a hard drive installation:
Be mindful that you need to have a pretty large hard disk in order to restore a dual layer dvd. You need around 8GB to restore Leopard. So this is not for a computer that sports a 20 or 40GB hard drive unless you won't needing storage space.