PowerBook 150 Ram Adapter

#1 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 - 03:15 68kMLA

I recently bought the angle adapter that allows use of Duo ram in a PB150, following a mere two years of looking (!). Hard piece to find.

With it, my PowerBook 150 can take up to 40MB of ram. While I do not have a spare 36MB chip, I think I do have a spare 20MB Duo chip available.

What I now want to know is how to get a nice, quiet IDE drive in the thing, which is NOT simply a matter of installation and formatting in the case of this unusual 1xx series machine. Has anyone here attempted a drive transplant into a PB150? If so, how difficult was it to set up?

#2 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 - 11:21 68kMLA

Are you sure that you can't just use Drive Setup to format the HDD? Having done a drive transplant on a PB150 many years ago i'm fairly sure thats what I did...if not I think you should be able to use Internal HD Format from memory.....

#3 Thu, 23 Apr 2009 - 17:12 68kMLA

There is some peculiarity stemming from the fact that there is (ahem) to be no driver on the disk. The driver is loaded from the machine on booting, for some reason.

Apple specified an unformatted hard drive in cases where hard drive replacement was required. But where would you get a suitable (small) one of those these days?

I've tried installing a new drive before with some of my small IDE laptop drives and gotten nowhere, but there must be a way. I shall tinker.... The trouble is simply that the original drive is a bit noisy.

#4 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 - 04:03 68kMLA

Maby you could try the going with the ide adapter route with a compact flash card. I used one in my PB1400, the PB150 uses the same type of drive. Totally quiet and uses less power. It would be faster than any of the old harddrives. Might be an option .

#5 Fri, 24 Apr 2009 - 16:13 68kMLA

CF-IDE in a 150 is not plug and play. In fact it involves some fairly sophisticated hardware hacking.

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#6 Sat, 25 Apr 2009 - 09:40 68kMLA

There's a write-up on this out on the net: http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/hardware/pb150/

#7 Tue, 28 Apr 2009 - 01:44 68kMLA

The PB150 is an oddball in several respects. The HD driver resides in ROM, for one thing, and the presence of another driver on the HD will generally prevent booting.

Internal HD Format version 1.0 should do the right thing (I don't believe any version of Drive Setup works correctly for this purpose). You can get a PB150 boot disk with the right utility from the download link found here: http://charm.cs.uiuc.edu/users/olawlor/mac/mac_PB_150.html

Hope that helps.