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Macbook Pro Hard Drive Swap

I am about to swap out the hard drive in my Macbook Pro for a larger faster drive and want a sanity check on the approach I am planning to take. Here goes.

1. I got one of the small Hitachi external 200 gb 7200 rpm drives.
2. Remove Hitachi drive from external enclosure
3. Remove OEM drive from MBP
4. Install Hitachi drive into MBP
5. Install OEM drive into external enclosure
6. Load OS X 10.5 (Leopard) on MBP from install disk
6. Install 10.5.2 update
7. Connect external drive and copy the applications/libraries from OEM drive to new MBP drive.

Step 7 is my biggest concern. I think it will work on the Mac OS but not sure. This approach will save a ton of time versus reloading the software from the discs or re-downloading and installing plus digging up license keys.

What do you think? Will this work? Will there be a potential performance hit going at it this way?
 

Terry

New member
Someone else will give you the definitive answer but what about the approach of setting everything up on the new drive before you install it (while it is your external) and then install.
 

Terry

New member
Here is a thread have a look at post #68 of this thread....

http://forum.getdpi.com/forum/showthread.php?t=875&page=4

John,
Basically, you first clone the existing internal drive. (There is great software for doing this. I use SuperDuper and it does and excellent job.) You will need either a small SATA capable laptop drive case, or just the bare drive connector to accomplish this. OWC (Macsales.com) sells both. The case is nice, as then you have a place for the drive you remove from the laptop to become a portable external drive for back-up or whatever.

You would then pull the drive from the MBP and replace it with the cloned version. Reassemble and you are good to go. OWC has online video tutorials that show you exactly how to do this. It is not hard, but there area about 21 screws that need to be taken out to accomplish the entire replacement. Not difficult, but one must take care not to misplace things. You will NOT have a problem doing this, given your present skill sets
 

Guy Mancuso

Administrator, Instructor
Mark you can also do this . Install the new hard drive and have the Leopard DVD in the drive . Boot up hitting C than it will want to install Leopard but when you get to the part on where you first have to go to the top and look for disk utility and format the drive ( on that thread Terry linked too will to you how). Than when Leopard loads all up and do your software updates . Take that old drive and connect it via Firwire 800 enclosure than go to Migrate assistant and transfer everything over OR use a time machine backup that you already may have from your old drive. Or you can do what Terry mentioned . there a couple ways to do this. Honestly the best way really is get a Firewire enclosure and than install the new drive format it like it is supposed to be than use Super Duper or Carbon copy ( i use this) than copy everything to new drive than install on MBP. Several ways do this. I like the enclosure because now you can take your old hard drive and clean it off than use it as the travel back up drive. So you can still get use from your old hard drive


Here is a nice enclosure with Firewire 800

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/MOTG800U2/
 
Thank you for the reply and especially the link to the other thread. I am not sure how I missed it, but that thread offers up a good way of doing what I want by using Time Machine. My goal is to start off with a clean install of Leopard and then restore the applications, libraries, and files as they were. The thread you linked indicates that Time Machine will let me do that.
 
Thanks Guy, this is good info. I plan to do the swap tomorrow. I already have the new drive and external enclosure (only USB 2.0, need to look into the firewire you linked).

By the way, you do need an Epson 3800. I saw you mention it in your Oly shift lens ad. I have the earlier generation Epson 4000 and have been very tempted at getting a HP Z3100 because it has a built in profiler. I have held off because I hope Epson will be updating their printers soon with some of the features introduced with the 11880.
 
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