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Macbook Pro Hard-drive Upgrade – Part 2
By greg | September 18, 2008
The Complete Guide / Reference / Resource guide to Upgrading your MacBook Pro’s hard-drive in Leopard (with VMware Fusion)
In my last post, I mentioned that I was little pressed for hard drive space in my MacBook Pro, and thus I was upgrading to a 2.5″ Seagate Momentus 250GB 7200RPM drive. It’s a little sketchy as to whether or not this little process voids the AppleCare Warranty, but I went ahead and did it anyways.
- Tools needed:
- External Hard drive
- Backup Software (SuperDuper!, Time Machine, or something of that sort)
- T-6 sized Torx screwdriver
- Small philips screwdriver (eye-glasses type?)
- Leopard OS Disc
- Paper and tape (or other way to keep track of screws
- Steady hands
- Another computer to read instructions from (obviously print-outs would work, too)
- A bit of reckless desire
I’m happy to say my Macbook Pro hardrive upgrade was a success, and the only minor setback was an ever-so-slight gap that’s been created along the shell of the laptop. It’s one of those things that only I would probably notice. Regardless, I’m going to describe in a bit of detail the process I went through to backup the old hard drive, the instructions to replace the old drive with the new drive, how I went about restoring everything back to the same state, and a few problems I encountered along the way (so that you can avoid them).
In case you haven’t read the 1st part of this “Hard-drive upgrade” series, I bought the 2.5″ Seagate Momentus 250GB 7200RPM drive from Other World Computing.
Before upgrading/replacing my Macbook Pro’s drive, I obviously backed up all my information. There are numerous ways to do this, but I chose to use the backup program SuperDuper! that I’ve been using for the past half year or so. It’s become a favorite of mine, as it’s simple to use and it makes an exact replica of your hard drive as a bootable disk image, making it simple to restore all the data exactly how it was before. I have it scheduled to backup my hard drive every night to my Western Digital USB external drive. So… I ran a smart-update sparse backup of the drive, and within a half hour, I was ready to go.
Related posts:
- Macbook Pro Hard-drive Upgrade – Part 1
- Snow Leopard – Installation (Part 1a/2-Two OS Installations in Three Days)
- What Exactly do you do with 1 Terabyte?
- Spring Cleaning… Tech Style
- Snow Leopard – First Impressions and SL’s (not) New Looks (Part 1b/2-Two OS Installations in Three Days)
- Change the Default Folder/System Icons in Leopard OS X
- Leopard OS X and VMware Fusion
- Make your Computer YOUR Computer
Topics: Apple, Mac, Mac tips, Upgrade, disk image | 8 Comments »
September 26th, 2008 at 3:05 am
I went through my second MBP hard-drive replacement, this time with a 500gig Samsung, and also this second time I got the ever-so-slight gap that I find really annoying. Did you find a solution, yet?
Cheers
Rafael
September 26th, 2008 at 9:43 am
I can’t say I have.
I haven’t really tried anything to fix it though. I think I/we may have just “permanently” bent something just enough to be noticeable.
If you happen to find a solution, let me know!
December 5th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
Gartner on Tuesday outlined its grand IT challenges from 2008 to 2033 and it includes a world where you’ll never have to charge your device. That was one of the futurama type predictions outlined by Gartner analyst Ken McGhee at the
December 7th, 2008 at 2:04 am
Thank you so much for your post… right when I first got my macbookpro I did take the plunge and updated the ram myself cheaper from 2 GB to 4 GB.. it went well… now I find myself in the same position of running out of hard drive space.. I am using VMWare and have a bootcamp windows XP partition. So I would like to backup my whole computer and restore as is… but then have the added space. Actually I would like to make my windows bootcamp partition bigger… but have a feeling I will have to reinstall windows… does SuperDuper backup your bootcamp partition as well? Thanks!
December 7th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Hey Emily,
Thanks for writing and glad I could be of help!
Unfortunately SuperDuper! does not backup bootcamp partitions.
Did you happen to see that there are multiple pages to this article? This page should be of particular interest. WinClone is free and worked pretty well for me when I just wanted to restore a bootcamp partition of the exact same size. When it came to actually restoring the data on a bigger partition, I ran into problems (by problems, I mean it just reverted the partition to the smaller size… somehow). I had to do a clean install
I will say that I didn’t have much on my partition, so I wasn’t terribly motivated.
I may have had problems because I was going from FAT32 to NTFS. If your partition was already over 32GB, then I suspect you may be fine. I’d recommend maybe posting over on WinClone’s web-forums. They should be happy to help out.
Hope that helps!
December 7th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Hi Greg,
Yes I indeed missed this page… THANKS! I think I can just reformat my windows partition and start fresh… just was going to try and save the time.
thank you!!!!
April 28th, 2009 at 9:53 am
greg, i had the same size problem with my windows partition using winclone. but found the solution in the winclone menu Tools>Expand Windows Filesystem, which then expanded the restored windows partition to the full size of the new partition (AFTER having restored to the original small partition size).. hope it’s of any use for the future.
April 28th, 2009 at 11:25 am
@bas
Ah… that would have saved me some time. Thanks for letting me know.