Surgery on a baby shrew

I bought a new disk for my powerbook on saturday. The new drive is 40 Gigs and amazingly tiny. Also got a firewire enclosure for the current drive.

Taking apart a powerbook is not for the faint of heart. The design is incredibly dense, when you take the back off and the battery out, the hole left by the battery looks immense. After wrestling with the wrong screw driver for a few minutes, eventually the current drive came out. Putting in the new drive isn't so hard, esp. if you have fingers like needles and no pulse. It took a while.

Anyway, now it all works again. Took some effort. The first install of OS X wouldn't convert the hiragana of sushi to kanji - it just hung. Other kanji were fine! The second install seems fine. Truly weird.

Firewire is pretty cool. The enclosure came with a power adaptor so, i presumed that it had to be plugged in. It doesn't it'll run off the power on the bus. It would be cool to install Linux on that disk but it looks like none of the distros support booting from firewire yet. Until that happens i have a spare disk to backup on to.