Score one for Dell, sort of

Tonight I had to get some data off a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has a totally screwed up W98ME installation. Rather than struggle again with burning CDs from the broken system, I decided to see how hard it was to get at the hard drive itself.

I didn’t have any directions or anything, I just flipped the laptop over and started unscrewing stuff (I’ve done this since I was a kid, but have gotten a little bit better at putting things back together). My first impression was, “Boy, look at this ugly design. Little bulges and seams everywhere. How inelegant.” Somewhere in the middle of that thought, having removed three likely-looking screws, I was pulling on an odd little hatch on the side and, whoosh, there’s the hard drive in my hand, mounted on its little sled. A minute later it was in my external FW enclosure and connected to my PowerBook.

I don’t even know if this is ultimately a better design (all those hatches and seams make the Inspiron squeaky and floppy – and how often do you swap out a hard drive?) but at the moment all I could think was, I’m really glad this wasn’t an iBook.

Now I can install Ubuntu on it.

Growler commented on Fri May 5 17:29:13 2006:

Of course, had it been an iBook, or any other mac, you would have just connected a firewire cable between it and some other computer, started it up whilst holding T, and the big shiny laptop would be a big shiny FW-harddisk-enclosure :-)

Paul commented on Fri May 5 21:17:49 2006:

That’s an excellent point. I’ve had occasion to use Target Disk Mode on several dead Apple laptops. However, I still remember the hell of getting at the drive in my old 2400c…