ibook hd replacement

Installed a new harddrive (HTS721080G9AT00) yesterday on my 3.5 year old ibook g3. Used the excellent instructions from pbfixit.com. It was not easy but certainly doable. Messed up the lower case a little bit, but you won't see the scratch if you don't know what you're looking for. So everything went fine.

I noticed that the Apple guys who replaced my logic board when i got the notorious problem, did a pretty good job ruining a couple of screws and even a torx.
The yellow tape, described in the instructions from ifixit, i found removed by apple care. Besides the instructions were excellent, if you don't mind some small inaccuracies.

The fun part was reinstalling my system software and restoring the backup. I had about 25 GB of data and approx. 18 GB on my backup medium. So there was no way of backing up the whole system avoiding the need to install everything from scratch (compiling my mysql, postgres, php ... fink, darwinports). Long story short: made a partial backup consisting mainly of my home directory – reinstalled Mac OS ... restored the backup.

ditto -V /Users/myname /Volumes/myIpod/myname
ditto -V /Volumes/myIpod/myname /Users/myname

Most interesting/frustrating part: this procedure corrupted the spotlight metadata. Folders were not folders anymore. They had no kMDItemKind of public.folder or something like that. Even erasing the whole index by

mdutil -E /

and waiting 45 min. to reindex the Volume was of no avail. After playing around with the spotlight tools i found the following:

1. I was able to recreate the index and metadata by using mdimport folder
   
   I actually used
   

   
   mdimport -d1 folder
   



2. and discovered to my great dismay that i got lots of errors like the following:
   

   
   mdimport[6456] Importer using too much memory
   (147 MB), hit critical threshold.
     Last file imported was: ...

   
   I could not see a pattern why this was happening. In some (most?) cases this behaviour was triggerd by larger files (around 10 MB of PDF), but sometimes it was simply erratic. Importing problematic files again helped.


3. Getting Metadata and index back for Mac OS related Applications like iCal or Adressbook was as simple as deleting the ~/Library/Caches Directory

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