A PowerBook that won’t boot

TidBITS Talk
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My husband is having a big problem with an elderly PowerBook that refuses to boot. I’m useless at hardware problems like this, and am hoping for some much needed help:

“I have an old PowerBook that won’t boot. A technician at a Mac store looked at it and said that because the logic board probably had failed, chances of reviving the laptop are nil.

The hard drive appears to be OK, and it contains data I want to recover. I don’t want to ask a data recovery service to do this as a lot of the information is sensitive. I think I should be able to remove the hard drive from the PowerBook, insert it into an external hard drive enclosure, connect that to a working Mac, and transfer the data from one to the other. I’m looking for advice/tips about selecting a hard drive enclosure and making the connection and data transfer the right way. Thank you! “

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If the drive is working, then yes, what you want to do is very easy.

Since this is a laptop drive, it will be 2.5". Depending on how old it is, that drive my be SATA or parallel ATA (PATA). If you don’t know, feel free to share the PowerBook model and lots of people will be able to look it up.

There are many many different kinds of SATA enclosures that support a 2.5" drive.

The least expensive SATA enclosure I found at Micro Center is this one: Inland 2.5" SAT to High-Speed USB 3.0 External Hard Drive Enclosure, currently listed for $11

If your drive is PATA, you may not find enclosures in retail stores, but a quick Amazon search finds many, including this one for $9.

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… and ifixit has instructions on getting that drive out safely: powerbook — Search - iFixit
If they don’t someone on this list will know ;-)

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