Installing hard drive in a G4 12"?

Hello, I'm going to replace my 40GB drive with a 60 today. This drive came out of a windows laptop. do I need to reformat before I get started or will the restore disks do it for me? I hear it's a real PITA to take this thing apart so I don't want to do it twice in the same day..lol just in case it matters it a 12" 1.33 (late 2005) with 512mb on board. Thanks again

Roncgizmo,

It is a royal pain to put a new hdd in the iBooks .. if you have an external usb drive you could erase it via diskutil in the os before cracking things open.. to be honest I would go with a 120GB or more so you don't run out of space quickly .. also have a clean big area to start with .. and patents the first time you take one apart is very daunting to say the least .. sheets of copy paper help with maping out where the screws go .. Draw pictures and use the web site ifixit to help that is a direct link to your iBook

Good luck

Thanks, I would love to go bigger but I've been spending way to much the past month and I'm out of a job on the 25th I have this 60 already so I thought I'd use it.. It's only going to cost me a little time I've taken other laptops apart so I'm thinking (hoping) it will go well.

Roncgizmo said:

Hello, I'm going to replace my 40GB drive with a 60 today. This drive came out of a windows laptop. do I need to reformat before I get started or will the restore disks do it for me? I hear it's a real PITA to take this thing apart so I don't want to do it twice in the same day..lol just in case it matters it a 12" 1.33 (late 2005) with 512mb on board. Thanks again

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Are you sure that the hard drive from a PC will work in your iBook? Hopefully someone with a little more knowledge than me can offer an answer but I'd double-check that before you take the whole thing apart.

Yeah, it should be fine. I'm using the same type as a external. However I think I'm going to take csegeek's advice and buy something bigger.. I was out shopping today and picked up a gig of memory, the place I was at had 250gb drives for less then 80 bucks (it would also give me an extra 1000 rms's) I think it would be foolish that price to put the 60gb/4200rpm drive in. So I'm going to wait a week or two.

Hard drives and most memory are interchangeable in the iBook PowerBooks and PC's apple will tell you they are not and so will the PC manufactures..
cause they want to make $$$$ on proprietary accessories just watch out for
the spec's on memory .. and go for the 5400 rpm drive when ever possible ..

good luck on your swap ..

I have had luck with SuperDuper! its free to clone
hard drives under OS X .. from an internal to external drive .. actually I
installed Tiger on an older 20GB iPod via firewire.. while waiting for a hard
drive to install in a G4 I was repairing .. once i received the hard drive I
cloned the install off of the iPod back to the internal drive in the iBook
Saved me some time .. don't know if you can clone down to usb but it may
be worth a try..