Swapping Hard Drives from PPC to Intel

[JimmyB248]

Ok, here's my problem. About a month ago a speaker fell from the wall and cracked my head open and then bounced onto my 17" Powerbook G4, smashing the screen in the process. Fortunately this was covered under the house insurance and things seem to have worked out for the best as from the insurance money I have ordered myself a MacBook Pro and got a 30g iPod 5G.

Problem? Ok, the insurance company collected my PB and kept it, I asked for it back as I wasn't able to make a complete backup of all my data and my music and photos are on the PB hard drive but nowhere else. So they sent me the hard drive, that's it. I have got an external hard drive and what I'm hoping is that I will be able to remove the hard drive from my MBP when it arrives and swap it with the old hard drive just to take the data off it and put it on the external hard drive, then swap the hard drives back and bam bam all done.

Is this possible? I'm seeing problems with it, but it's purely speculation. Will the Intel chips recognise how to read data off a hard drive which was made to run on PPC? I don't know, any advice as to whether this would work, how I'd be able to swap the hard drive's anyway, or other methods of getting the data off the hard drive would be great.

Thanks
Jimmy

 

[mad jew]

The Intel machine won't boot up from a PPC version of Tiger. Could you keep the MacBook hard drive where it is and put the PowerBook hard drive into the external enclosure. There shouldn't be any problem with the MacBook accessing data from this drive, it just won't be able to boot from it.

 

[Nermal]

I don't know what sort of connection those 2.5" drives use, but you should be able to put it into an external enclosure (you may need an adapter). This will probably be the easiest way.

 

[balamw]

I don't know what sort of connection those 2.5" drives use, but you should be able to put it into an external enclosure (you may need an adapter). This will probably be the easiest way.

I concur, just use it as an external on your current system. I sort of did this last week when I finally got around to moving my iPhoto library from the iBook to the iMac. (Target mode lets you use your PPC Mac as an external FW drive if it's working, otherwise you need a different adapter/enclosure/cable).

USB enclosures or just cables can be had for ~$20 and up.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812156015

B

 

[JimmyB248]

Brilliant. Thanks a lot for the help, I was getting a little worried about losing all my stuff. I've worked damn hard on that music collection.

 

[CanadaRAM]

The Powerbook hard drive is 2.5" IDE, the MBP Hard drive is 2.5" SATA... no go on the swap.

Like they said ^^, get an external USB/Firewire combo MacAlly aluminum case, put in the Powerbook drive and be happy.

 

[Laser47]

Aside from an enclosure you will need an adaptor to allow you to connect the external drives IDE cable to the notebook hard drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812203012

 

[mad jew]

Good point sheep, I forgot about the SATA factor.

Are there no notebook-sized SATA-equipped external cases?

 

[CanadaRAM]

Aside from an enclosure you will need an adaptor to allow you to connect the external drives IDE cable to the notebook hard drive.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812203012

Huh? Not if you buy a 2.5" enclosure. There's no good reason to buy a 3.5" desktop enclosure and then an adaptor. The Powerbook 17" drive is an IDE so it'll go in an 2.5" IDE - FW case no problems. And then, why not just leave it in there?

The insurance company is letting you keep the hard drive?

 

[Laser47]

Huh? Not if you buy a 2.5" enclosure. There's no good reason to buy a 3.5" desktop enclosure and then an adaptor. The Powerbook 17" drive is an IDE so it'll go in an 2.5" IDE - FW case no problems. And then, why not just leave it in there?

The insurance company is letting you keep the hard drive?

Oops. I guess when I wrote that, I forgot the fact that they make 2.5' enclosures.

 

[JimmyB248]

Yep they're letting me keep it. I live in the UK, just found myself a USB 2.5 inch Hard Drive Enclosure £15, seems good enough for me. Means I get myself an extra 100gigs as well for free. I've done quite well out of this situation.