Everything Apple (the Mac heads thread)

No worries, apparently the 80g Toshiba drives have a history of dying. On the plus side i back up most important things and went from 80g to 150g drive in my PB G4 12'

The only bitch is reloading all the updates and such once you re-install the OS. Apparently the best way is to clone the complete system with Carbon Copy Cloner but i had not gone that far. Unfortunately PowerBooks can not boot from a USB drive so that kills alot of options when it comes to downloading OS X etc. I managed to get a copy of Leopard retail and fit it on single layer DVD (you delete the languages to get the space). Not had any issues so far using it. Same goes for iLife.

Cheers

There are a few other options. I did this when I had my iBook.

I basically created a partition on the end of my drive that was 9GB, then wrote the dmg image of leopard to that partition. I then told the mac to boot from that drive, and do a install from there (however you effectively lose 9gb on ur drive).

Optionally you can do the same thing with a external firewire drive.

You can also boot from a usb drive you can boot from that with a PowerPC mac ... it is not easy and involves using the OpenBIOS command (which IMO is superior than UEFI). I have successfully done it on a PowerBook g4 1.67 GHZ model for my ex-girlfriend ... but not on my iBook.