How to get info off your old HD onto your new one:
a) You could just burn the files and applications you care about to CDROM, copy them to Zip disk, or otherwise copy the files to any kind of media you’re able to copy to. Then once you’ve got the new HD installed, you just pop the CD or Zip cart into the drive and copy them over to their new home.
Alternatively, you can keep your old hard disk and use it as an external, and use the files on it without copying them at all:
b) Other World Computing makes some kickass FireWire enclosures of the “bring your own drive” kind. Or alternatively you could buy your new intended hard disk in one of those enclosures, thereby buying one item instead of two.
c) Alternatively, MCE sells a WallStreet expansion bay hard drive kit that’s also a bring your own drive, as well as selling expansion bay modules with a hard disk already in them (thereby once again allowing you to buy one item instead of two if you go that route).
The advantage of going with the FireWire solution is that you can easily, effortlessly, hook up that entire drive to any other modern Mac, including your future Mac that you’ll eventually purchase. That’s not true of the Expansion Bay module which is only useful in a WallStreet. The advantage of the Expansion Bay module is that you can boot MacOS 9 from an expansion bay hard disk (but not MacOS X). So if you’re using MacOS 9 (or 8 for that matter) now, you’d just put your entire existing HD in the expansion bay and whenever you want to boot MacOS 9, you can do so and you’ve got the world as you know it now right there in front of you. Meanwhile, your document files and whatnot would be available even when booted in MacOS X.
If you run your computer with the sound muted, unmute it before doing stuff under the hood, so you can hear the absence or presence of the boot chime when you’re done.
To swap out the processor daughtercard for the Sonnet G4 and swap out the 2 gig HD for a nice big one, you need two tools: a small phillips head screwdriver and a special kind of screwdriver called a torx, specifically a size T8 torx. Pop out the battery and the CDROM drive or whatever it is you’ve got in your two expansion bays by pulling on the levers at far left front and far right front. Then reach inside them and feel for the clips that hold down the keyboard. They are overhead and pull forward. Once youv’e done that, the keyboard can be lifted up and out of the way and you’re looking down on a heat shield held in place by two phillips head screws.
Touch the heat shield to discharge any static electricity in your own bod then unplug the AC adapter.
Loosen them and lift the head shield out of the way. Processor daughtercard is pretty much dead center, with the upper RAM module visible. (There’s another RAM module on the underside). The hard disk is in a caddy and is on the right, held down by its own phillips head screw.
The hard disk caddy lifts out easily once you’ve loosened the phillips head screw (which stays permanently connected to the caddy). You need to take the drive out of the caddy and for that you need the torx screwdriver. Two screws hold the little circuit tab that connects the drive to the motherboard, and four more hold the caddy plate to the drive. If you got a 60, tape something like a boxcutter blade or an old fashioned single edge razor blade to the right top of the drive (right top as installed, that is) to shield the WallStreet magnet from the 60gig drive magnet. Then bolt it in place, pop the connector on the front and bolt it on, and insert it into its connector and tighten the phillips head to retain it.
If you’re installing the Sonnet G4 card, install MacOS X to the new hard disk first and then go back in to replace the stock G3 daughtercard with the G4 Sonnet card. Why? Because there’s a CD-booting bug in the Sonnet card, you can’t boot OS X from CD with the Sonnet card installed. So keep your stock card, you’ll need it every time you upgrade to a newer full CD-based version of OS X (like 10.4, Tiger, which is coming out soon). You can still boot MacOS 9 from CD without problem, though.
If you’re going to install Panther (10.3.x) or Tiger (10.4.x, which isn’t out yet), you’ll need to use a product called XPostFacto to perform the install because old relics like our WallStreets aren’t supported for these newer operating systems by Apple and the CD won’t install these operating systems on our machines without a bit of cheating. If you want to go with Jaguar (10.2.8), you can install without XPostFacto.
Sonnet’s accelerator ships with an actual instructional video on a CD, along with a software app that copies the ROM from the stock card to a file so it can be copied to the new card. The daughtercard itself is plugged into the motherboard and lifts out with a little L shaped tool, although you can also just insert a screwdriver gently under the lip of the daughtercard where it just clears the metal rim at far right, using that metal rim as a fulcrum and lifting and it pops out of its socket. If you use the L shaped tool, the bottom of the L slides under the lip of the daughercard and you just lift straight up. You’ll be putting new RAM on the new card so you don’t need to do anything with the old RAM, but you can see how there are two retaining clips left and right and if you pull them back out of the way the RAM chip pops up and you just lift it out of the socket. Your new RAM will go into the corresponding empty slots in the Sonnet daughercard, bottom end with the copper contacts in first then pivot down until those retaining clips snap into place to hold 'em in. Take the Sonnet card and align the two puzzle-piece tabs in back with the holes in the metal rim, then pivot it down so that the connector meets the connector socket — press down and you should feel it mesh smoothly and firmly.
Plug in the AC and hit the power button. If you get a boot chime, life is good. If you do not get a boot chime, something is probably not plugged in properly, is not properly seating in its connector. If you get an obviously intentional sound but other than the boot chime, that’s usually specific for the RAM and means you should check that the RAM chips are properly seated on the daughtercard.
