Helped out a friend with a problematic iBook on Sunday. We commandeered his kitchen table and tore the whole laptop apart, stem to stern, all to replace the display cable and the internal hard drive. Got the whole thing back together too. And best of all it seems to be working… I’d left before the backup of the old drive had been fully restored, but it was booting up in target disc mode and the screen wasn’t flickering on and off randomly.
Next time I try something like this, I’m going to get a bunch of different colored magic markers so that I can color code the different screws as they’re being removed. I’d tried grouping them based on the part of the computer we were working on when we removed them, but one good jostle of the table took care of that.
Probably the strangest thing about the interior of the iBook was the astonishing amount of tape. Pretty much every strand of wire or chunk of metal shielding was secured with a length of bright yellow adhesive tape. It lent a sort of MacGuyver-esque feel to the operation.