68kMLA

Nice one, what’s the spec and how is the tunnelling?

It's maxed out with 14MB of RAM total and an 120MB spinny IBM hard drive, it has the modem card installed too. I'm unsure about the tunneling but it's not that bad

Who stole my PRAM battery?

Someone removed it as a pre-emptive measure, but I’ve never seen one leak.

Would you put a SCSI emulator in?

No. I love the clickety-clacky mechanical HD

Me too, but it will probably fail before long. These early 2.5” SCSI HDDs are among the least reliable drives I’ve come across.

100%. clickety-clacky is more like a ticking timebomb... and the timer is getting dangerously close to 0:00.

The best hard drive I had was an IBM 250MB unit that came with a PowerBook 520c. It ran perfectly. And then one day after not using it for a while, the heads seized during boot up and that was it.

All five of my 100-Series PowerBooks (145,165 & 180) came with dead HDDs - even those which were in otherwise quite good condition.

I think the rubber bumpers must've gone gooey, locking the heads in place. You should be able to replace them.

I’ve binned all those drives now but am fairly sure it wasn’t sticky bumpers.

Now it doesn't want to wake up... I usually get stuck on the checkered screen after putting it to sleep and powering it back up.

Welcome to the world of pain that is the 140-180 series.

Turns out the reason for this odd sleep cycle seems to be the IBM hard drive. After being spinned down by the power manager, then spinning back up again, it usually doesn't read. Even the mouse cursor freezes sometimes.
When booted from a floppy you can sleep/wake no problem