iBook HD upgrade

Part 6- Reassembly

Reassembly is simply the reverse of disassembly, but you should find it is much quicker to do - however DO NOT RUSH. It is easy to overlook a screw, and it is important that metal foil and other tapes are replaced correctly.

a. First replace the upper rf shield, taking care to replace the peeled back ends of the tapes, and make sure you reconnect the rf earthing strap at the rear of the unit. The shield can be tricky to relocate properly, especially in the rear left corner - it may need some gentle coaxing down into the correct position but DO NOT use a lot of force. Also ensure that the Airport antenna cable is correctly threaded through into the correct position. Replace all of the screws.

b. Reposition the upper case half, reconnecting the two wire connectors at rear and left before snapping the case over the chassis. Make sure it is located correctly and that the Airport antenna connector is in the right place. Replace the screws fixing the case in the keyboard recess area, and replace the small magnet over the central rear screw. The mousepad ribbon cable can be reconnected by lifting the plastic retainer, gently dropping the cable end into the connector and pushing down on the retainer.

c. Close the unit and turn it over. Replace the screws holding the upper case shell to the chassis from the bottom. Refit the screw holding the sleep LED.

d. Replace the lower rf shield, carefully peeling back and replacing the three tapes. Also take care to ensure that foil strips are correctly replaced and stuck down in their proper positions. Refit the screws holding the shield in place.

e. Check that cables in the monitor hinge area are routed correctly around the fixing holes without fouling, and replace the lower case shell, snapping it into place all the way around. Take special care to make sure that the battery ejection springs find their way into their proper channels in the lower case. Replace the foot recesses which will only go in one position to sit correctly in the recess. Replace all of the screws. Refit the foot centres which are a simple push fit.

f. Turn the unit over and open it. Reposition the keyboard keys down so that the ribbon cable can be reconnected. Lift the retainer bar on the connector, carefully slot the cable end into the connector and press the retainer bar down to retain the cable.

g. Replace the memory coverplate, taking care to position the Airport antenna connector above the plate. Refit the Airport card (if fitted). Rotate the keyboard into position and clip it in place.

h. Eject the CD tray by locating the release ratchet and operating it with a screwdriver. Pull the tray out and refit the drawer escutcheon by clipping on the lower edge and rotating it into position. Replace the two black self tapping screws. Close the CD drawer, checking that the escutcheon fits properly.

i. Replace the battery

Take a deep breath, and switch the unit on. You should get the standard "start up" tones which indicate a successful power-on self test. At this stage you'll need to boot the computer from a CD system disk and format the new hard disk and install a bootable OS on it.

The copying of data from the old disk to the new is left as an exercise for the reader - in my case I mounted the original disk in a G4 desktop Mac as a second drive using a readily available and cheap adaptor which matches it to the standard IDE drive cable. You can also buy a Firewire drive chassis and mount your original drive in that, connecting it to the upgraded laptop using Firewire.

After this installation, benchmarking my iBook showed a very substantial increase in performance for disk I/O tasks. It was almost twice as fast for some operations. With Mac OS X, this translates to a very useful improvement in useful speed of the iBook for many tasks. You may like to try XBench before and after for yourself to show this benefit.

Another benefit of the disk I used is that the iBook now runs much more quietly than it did.

Beginning...