Thanks to a generous donation I was able to buy an iBook (second hand) a little while ago. The reason for this was to develop a Mac OS X version of pVoice. However, from day two I got strange errors, the machine locked up, and I got the feeling something was wrong with it. Indeed, it turned out that the harddrive was broken.
Of course harddisks are replaceable. But it's not a trivial task to replace a harddrive for a notebook, and the iBook's harddrive is really hidden behind covers and lots, lots of screws. I ordered a Samsung 80GB 2.5" harddisk (5400rpm) to replace the standard 20GB (4200rpm) harddisk that comes with the G3 model of my iBook.
It took me all morning, lots of sweat and swearing, but I did it! I used the guides that this page refers to. There were four screws that were really, really stuck and wouldn't come out, but after lots of force, they did. The rest was a breeze.
Now, I'm re-installing the machine (from scratch of course), and it's really much faster than it was before (of course, this harddrive is 5400rpm instead of 4200rpm, and has a 8mb cache instead of the 2mb the old drive had).
I'm look iooking forward to using the machine...without strange errors this time please...
