MacBook Pro HD Upgrade
I upgraded my hard drive yesterday. I decided to cover all my bases and have plenty of backup. I got started on Sat. evening by plugging in a large USB drive I had kicking around. Time Machine fired up and asked if I wanted to use it for backups. I went along and was prompted to reformat the drive for the exclusive use of Time Machine. Once the drive was configured Time Machine took a backup of the OS X drive. It ran silently in the background. I left the MacBook Pro plugged in to the drive for the evening and TM took a backup (incremental) every hour. I ended up with 5 backups.
I followed instructions I found on the web here and here to replace the drive. As it happens, you need a Torx T-6 driver to remove two of the many screws that have to come out to get at the hard drive. I had to wait until Sunday when I could get the necessary tools to crack the case as a result. Many PC type computers I’ve worked with make replacement of internal components quite simple. Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) they call them. Well, if the difficulty of accessing and removing/replacing components in a Mac is any indication of the reliability of said components, my mind has been put at ease. I had to remove something like 17 screws (teeny weenie screws at that!) to open the case and get at the hard drive in my MacBook Pro.
The video instructions had a step to install the new drive in a USB case, open Disk Utility and copy the old disk partition onto the new drive, so I did that. The I went through the tedious process of removing all the screws, opening the case and removing the old drive. The instructions were very accurate and complete in this regard. I removed the old drive and installed the new drive, a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. The old drive is 120 GB 5400 RPM Fuji.
After replacing all the screws to reassemble the case I pressed the power switch to boot the computer and was very disappointed when it did not boot off the new drive. So I inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and booted off that. I restored the backup from Time Machine to the new drive and rebooted. Merde! The drive continued to fail to boot. In the end I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard and on first boot it asked if I wanted to transfer information from another image or a backup or network location. I plugged in the old drive (now mounted in the USB case) and chose that. It copied over all the user settings, applications, files, etc to the new drive and I was back in business with a new, larger, faster hard drive, and a spare 120 GB USB drive for music backup.
I’m pleased with the result. My Acer had 160 GB. I now have 320 GB and it’s nice and quick. The new drive cost me $72.99 CDN. Next I’ll upgrade the RAM.
Tags: Mac