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Powerbook G3 Lombard - HD is dying

Hello everyone,

My Powerbook G3 Lombard Hard drive is slow and makes click sounds, I'm sure it's pretty much dead now :( . So I'm going to buy a new one. But I don't really know which interface the HD needs to have; some say PATA, some say SATA etc., and I've read something about a maximum HD size of 128GB, which makes it pretty hard to find a new one. Do I need to know more about the Powerbook G3 HD's, or is this all I need to know? I hope someone can clear this up for me. Thanks :) !

 

stretch

Well-known member
Here's what I did when my Lombard HD started the downhill ride.

First, I was able to hook up an external SCSI with an HDI-30/SCSI adapter and clone the HD to an external drive. This was more of a concern to me than the drive replacement itself.

Once I had the drive cloned and a test boot done from the external drive, I was good to replace the drive. I went to Best Buy and bought a WD Scorpio Blue 250GB PATA hard drive. Yes, 250GB. It was the smallest drive they had. The issue I found is that the Lombard controller will only recognize 128GB max, so I have half of the HD unavailable to this machine. I partitioned it 10GB, 10GB, 108GB. One 10GB is the main system, the other 10GB is a bootable system backup and 108GB all data. It works great.

Now at some point down the road where I retire this machine, I have a 250GB HD that I could use in another machine.

 
Wow, thanks for your help! Now I know what I need to search for :lol: . Btw, I just bought an iBook G3 :beige: . It looks and works very nice.

 
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