The 12″ PowerBook G4 is a real pain to take apart. I am in the process of replacing the HDD and optical drive and you have to strip the PowerBook down completely. Everything from the motherboard up needs to be removed before you can extract the optical drive. The HDD is only marginally easier to get to.

Anyhow, last night I reached a milestone. I am now putting things back together instead of taking them apart. In all honesty I probably have another 6 hours of tinkering to do.

The end result will be a very usable PowerBook with a working optical drive and a 160GB HDD. I think it’s worth it…