Interesting...

I had noticed my PowerBook was running really hot, with the fan going full tilt after only three or so minutes of use. Crap, I thought. I don't want to replace the logic board. But another thing occurred to me; the CD drive would spin up on boot, but there was no disk in it, and the drive wouldn't spin down like it was supposed to. That's awfully strange, so I decided that I would reinstall OS X. I grabbed my install disk, and put it in the drive. *tap*. Wait, there is a disk in there, but it isn't showing up. well crap, the eject button wouldn't work, and when I tried the "open iTunes/Disk Utility and eject from there" methods, the applications just froze. Well shit. Go to OpenFirmware and do it from there? Can't access OpenFirmware because Yaboot is in the way. Last-ditch effort of restarting with the mouse button held down? Of course that one is the one that worked. The CD came right out, wondering what it was, I read the label. "Debian Installation CD". I haven't reinstalled Debian in months, but oh well. The PowerBook is way quieter now, and the fan is almost never on. Strange what a single CD will do.

I broke it

It being by main desktop PC, broke being the partition tables. I was trying to dual-boot Debian Linux and Windows 10, and failed admirably. I had some very important information on both of the hard drives (passwords on one, and photos on the other), so I couldn't just reformat and reinstall. I had to buy a SATA to USB adapter, and managed to score this one from amazon:

You'll see that it has 44 pin and 40 pin IDE connectors as well as SATA, and those are for my old laptop hard drive I have kicking around. With this adapter, I was able to rescue all of the things I wanted and reformat the drives. I reinstalled Windows (7) and got all of my settings back on their merry way. A couple of notes about the adapter: It works in Mac and Windows without needing the included 'driver disk', which contains nothing but Chinese and English links to an online user manual. I suspect it's another one of those cheap Chinese rips of a product, but it works well enough for me.

Link for adapter: http://www.amazon.com/Unitek-Converter-Universal-Function-Software/dp/B00EHDTRJ6/?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1446919144&sr=1-2&keywords=unitek+sata+to+usb+adapter