QEIIRepair

Hard Drive Enclosures. The sticker on my hard drive says 'ultra ata', but every enclosure I can find uses 'SATA'. Are these the same thing or can anyone recommend a site where I can buy an 'ultra ATA' enclosure?

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On the left side of the bezel end of the 12" 800Mhz iBook optical drive, there is a rectangular, surprisingly powerful magnet, it does not seem to be doing anything. Can I remove it?

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the front shield on the iBook G4 has many screw holes, they are easy to miss and nothing bad comes from leaving a few out.

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5th Gen iPod? Which iPod Type is it?

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It's possible with iBook G4 so it should be fine. Bit pricey though...

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Both are valid but try turning it on and leaving it for several minutes, it might just be a lag in the display turning on.

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One iBook (G4, but bear with us) we were asked to fix had a fairly similar problem. It would do nothing but make a small noise at start-up. We were baffled. We quickly concluded that this was a logic board problem. Wrong. Several minutes after happening to leave the iBook plugged in to the mains after an attempt to boot it up, it turned on. It was displaying the Username Selection Screen.

It turned out that the small noises were relevant, the iBook had been booting-up behind the screen, the screen only turned on after the entire Mac OS 10.0.3 boot-up procedure had finished. How to solve this problem seems to be to replace the Logic Board. But if you leave your iBook long enough, you might see it turn on. It's up to you whether you can put up with an iBook that pretends it's dead.

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Well, that grate leads to the hard drive. Air comes in through that grill, past the hard drive, into the heat sink, through the fan and out the hinge grill. If the grating noise is coming out of the hinge grill also, it is most likely that you need a replacement fan. If it is just coming from the front portside grill, then it would appear to be a hard drive problem. Generally however, hard drive problems cause the the computer to stop functioning. Can you still boot up your system, read files e.t.c?

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Yep, the backlit bit has a separate connector, there are no guides on ifixit.com for the 17" Unibody Macbook Pro yet, so either plug it in yourself (if your quite confident) or take it back to the Genius Bar.

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If you can get it up a little, you can use tweezers to twist it out. If you can't get it up at all, sunrisetech is right, drill it out. However, if your just replacing a hard drive, you'll need to put it back in again, so it might be worth buying the iBook Clamshell Screw Set to replace it.

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Maybe you need a new logic board?

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We (QEII Repair) have no experience in the unibody Macbook/Macbook Pros, but we can recommend that you check the fan casing for any foreign contaminant that may be jamming or slowing the fan down. If that fails to solve the problem, you might want to replace the fan. (If anyone else posts further advice, try that first). A temporary solution until the fan is fixed is to use an external desk fan to keep the exterior of computer cool and if there are any ventilation holes in the unibody macbook pro, use them to input cool air to keep the system fresh; and stop that loud fan from having to work at any more than idle pace.

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