Disabling failed internal hard drive in iBook G4 ?

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Pyranose

Registered
Ok, the hardrive in my 12" iBook has failed. Of course replacing it in this model requires the removal of 41 screws of 7 different types and basically tearing the iBook apart.

So I'm running it quite well from an external firewire drive.

However, the internal drive condition's has gotten worse, it now stalls OS X from time to time as the OS tries to access it. It prevents shut down some of the time and also makes an awful noise until I manage to manually unmount it.

So I want to permanently disable detection of this drive in the OS. Basically I want OS X not to try to automount this drive on startup.

I have not succeeded so far.... any suggestions ? And yes, I've tried modifying fstab with no results.

Any help appreciated.
 
You _could_ disconect it.. not quite as many screws need to be removed as if you removed it.
 
I think it's still over 36 screws just to get to it. The Fix it guide has 17 pages.

You can't even SEE the hard drive before page 15, if I could get there I would replace it.
 
That's true.. but, the laptop isn't very portable if you can't move it away from the external hard drive, is it? There's people that can install it.. but I guess if you like it like that, it's fine. I'm not sure how to disable auto-mount, I guess your Mac does it to find a bootup volume, and the internal hard drive comes first.
 
eric2006 said:
That's true.. but, the laptop isn't very portable if you can't move it away from the external hard drive, is it? There's people that can install it.. but I guess if you like it like that, it's fine. I'm not sure how to disable auto-mount, I guess your Mac does it to find a bootup volume, and the internal hard drive comes first.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the replies anyway, I've been hitting a wall on this problem for awhile now. I got a quote of $350.00 from a technician for repairs. Funny thing is I'm a computer tech myself, I'm not just confident in my ability to take the thing appart without breaking something, I've never seen such a complex internal setup.

I'm sure there has to be a config file somehwere that would allow me to disable the drive mount but for the life of me I haven't been able to find it yet.
 
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