iBook 2.5in hard drive

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Hi,

My G3 iBook died, and so I took it to pieces, wanting to use the hard drive in my PC laptop. However, the drive - an IBM Travelstar 30gb - isn't recognised by my laptop, nor will it work if I put it in my USB caddy. The drive says Apple Firmware on it; will this prevent it from working on a PC? And is there any way I can flash the firmware, without using a Mac (I haven't got one anymore)?

Any information would be very gratefully received :)
 
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Kokopelli

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I doubt the hard drive firmware itself is customized. The drive is hfs so maybe your PC is just not recognizing it? Did you check disk manager to see of the volume is showing up? Either way you will need to reformaat the drive before it is of any use.
 
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Thanks Kokopelli :)

I know I'll have to format it in order to use it, but it's not even being recognised by the BIOS on my PC laptop, so I can't format - I can't do zip. Perhaps if I put it in my USB caddy and find someone with a Mac I can see if it's recognised? I'll be extremely upset if it was the HDD that was broken and not the logic board (As they told me in the Apple store) as it will mean I've destroyed my favourite computer ever for nothing :(
 
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Does the drive have any jumpers on the back by the IDE connection? May be worth trying to set it to master or slave (depending on what your setup is). Also, have you booted into a Dos boot disk (Windows 98 boot disk does fine) and run FDISK.EXE to see if it sees the disk?
 
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I can't remember seeing any jumpers; as far as I know, it's a jumperless one. I'll have a look, although I think if I'd seen them I would have noticed. Not tried the FDISK thing yet, as I presumed that if the BIOS couldn't see the HDD, FDISK wouldn't be much use. I will try though. Thanks for your help :)

As far as anyone knows, though, there's no reason why an 'Apple Original Firmware' HDD wouldn't work in a PC laptop?
 
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It should show up somewhere...

Try installing Macdrive (http://www.mediafour.com/) to access the HFS+ formatted drive natively under windows and delete it with a partition tool...

(there's one hidden somewhere in windows, but TBH I'm too merry (=drunk) to remember exactly where - M$ likes to hide useful things)).
 

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