Margin Notes: When a Power Mac dies...

Every so often, I report on some personal troubleshooting adventure that I believe may be of more general interest. In this case, my situation involved having to send a computer in for repair but wanting to retain access to the data on the Mac's hard drive while waiting for the computer to be fixed:

Last week my Power Mac G4 died. It was one of those cases described by Apple: "The Power Mac G4 computer screen is black. The boot tone is not present, the drive does not operate, but the fan is running, and LED is lit." Inevitably, I had to take the Mac in for repair (I am still waiting for it to get fixed; the service provider is waiting for a new logic board to arrive from Apple).

Before I left off the G4, I removed its hard drive (this is quite easy to do with a G4; it requires just removing one screw; I would not try this on an iMac). I removed the drive for two reasons. First, I wanted to protect against the (however unlikely) possibility that a misguided repair person might reformat the drive to see if that fixed the problem. Second, because there were files on the computer that had not been backed up (especially the most recent email I had received), I wanted to be able to access those files while I waited out the inevitable delay in getting the computer repaired. I could do this by attaching the drive to my PowerBook - which I was now using as my main computer.

To do this, I first had to purchase an external case for the drive. I tried a couple of dealers, but they either did not carry such cases or were out-of-stock. I eventually found and contacted StarTech.com. Normally, they do not sell to end-users. However, because I could not locate a retailer that would sell me a case, they agreed to send me one directly. The case I ordered was designed to hold an ATA drive and used FireWire to connect the drive to the Mac. [Note: StarTech makes a similar case for a CD-ROM drive; make sure you get the right one!]

Installing the drive was easy enough, but when I connected it to my FireWire PowerBook, not much happened. The light on the drive unit turned on to indicate that it was getting power, but the drive did not spin up. Also, Apple System Profiler on the PowerBook did not even register that a FireWire device was attached. I quickly remembered that I had never updated to PowerBook Firmware 2.7 (a version specifically designed to improve FireWire support). After doing this, the PowerBook did correctly sense that a device was attached. But there was still one glitch. For some reason, the drive would not spin up if it was attached to the FireWire 1 port on the PowerBook. But when I finally tried the FireWire 2 port, it worked like a charm. At this point, I did not care to figure out why the ports differed; I was just happy to get everything working. [Note: the drive and case are designed to work without requiring any external AC power source; although you can optionally attach one if needed.]

With all in place, the drive now mounted as an external drive on the PowerBook without any further modification. I could now access all my files from the drive. Transferring files to the PowerBook went at lightning speed (compared to transfers via Ethernet).

Once the G4 is back and the drive returned to its home, I will have an empty FireWire case. Having already paid for the case (it retails for $185), it now seems "cheap" to buy an internal ATA drive for it and have a permanent external FireWire drive. For example, APS sells a 40GB internal ATA drive for $200. You can get an external FireWire version for $290, but the case requires a separate power supply. Perhaps more comparable is a 30GB LaCie PocketDrive - which sells for $800. My 40GB setup would be less than half that price and offer the same portability (although it is somewhat larger).