Remember back in, oh, mid-September when I posted about my Powerbook's unfortunate Three Foot Tune-up? At the time I was marveling at how the computer managed not to sustain any damage after falling three feet onto a hard linoleum floor (linoleum, linoleum, linoleum...what a word!).
A couple weeks later I got a Paste Magazine along with included audio CD. Slid it into the Powerbook and a great silence ensued (ensued, ensued, ensued...hmm, not the same) followed by the CD being unceremoniously spat out of yon powerbook.
After a few more attempts to get past the spitting out part I concluded that the drive was hosered. Dang! But also cool, since it was a perfect excuse to open the powerbook. As sad as it is to see things break I truly do love opening them up for a peek.
The hope was that the hefty force of impact merely jarred a connector loose. Or slightly sprained some mechanical arm in the drive's loading mechanism. From listening to the drive after inserting a CD I deduced that the motor wasn't spinning, so maybe a switch was occluded?
I'd like to say the first thing I did was check warranty status and availability, but that's not the case. I grabbed the nearest torx driver and went to town. Yeehaw, chips! The powerbook has seven screws on the back, then a slight nudge to slide the cover forward a bit, and off it comes. Ewww, purty. Break time while I gather the other engineers in the office for a look. Everyone is impressed.
Lots of wiggling and jiggling and probing didn't expose a loose connector. There weren't any obviously broken circuit boards or bent metal. The edge of the powerbook case, just above the CD loading slot, had a small crack. Considering the crack is on the opposite end from the impact area that must have been one brutal slam.
Finally I took the drive out of the powerbook and took it apart to look for problems. In order to get the drive out you must disconnect three cool, surface mount edge connectors and a couple small power cables. See, there is an unused indentation on the side of the CD drive and the Apple engineers, letting no space go to waste, piggybacked a modem and another little circuit board into the nook.
Peeled them out, opened up the drive as much as I could manage, and still no smoking gun...er, component. Looked like the drive was dead. Or, as Charlie was too quick to point out, something on the motherboard was fried. Thanks, buddy.
MacResQ sells a replacement superdrive for powerbooks. Now my drive was pretty great, but it wasn't super. Great meaning that it could read/write CDs and read DVDs, while a superdrive can also write DVDs. Visions of iDVD danced through my head: gee, my own homemade DVD movies. Well, maybe not, but at the very least I could backup to DVD.
So I ordered a superdrive and waited. And waited. And, hey where's my drive??? Seems that last week was national "Do Not Remember Jerry & Faith's Delivery Address Week" with UPS and Airborne Express both in solemn observation.
Yesterday it finally showed. Cracked open the powerbook one last time, removed the old drive and transfered all of the boards and mounting hardware to the new drive, carefully slid back into place, checked and double checked connectors, eased the lid back on, and powered up the laptop. Success! At least to the point of not letting any smoke out.
I slipped the nearest CD into the drive (Windows CE drivers or something silly) and after some whirring and chirping the CD icon popped onto the OS X desktop and the files were readable. Good, good.
Anyone who has worked with me would be surprised to know that there's not a rack of audio cd's in my office. Since I got the iPod and started using the iTunes Music Store I don't really deal with physical CDs. Which meant I had to borrow a CD from Barry to try out audio playback.
Slipped in the disk, fired up iTunes...ah, there we go, hit play and music came out the speakers. While listening to music I pulled up the Apple Profiler to see what it thought of the drive:
For a second or so I thought to myself, "Hey, how do they know there's a screw loose?"
I suddenly noticed the CD cover. That's Barry for you, even without trying he has a twisted sense of humor.
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