After 18 months of having my MacBook Pro, I started outgrowing the hard drive. My laptop has to be a desktop replacement for me, since I am away from home so much. So, it has 1000’s of photos in RAW format, hours of camcorder footage, all my development environments, all my iTunes music, scans of every bit of post I receive and so on. I knew I was at the limit when I was having to offload stuff onto an external HDD in order to be able to keeping doing things I wanted to do.
External HDD’s are great, but fiddly as hell when your laptop is a mobile system. So, it was time for an upgrade, and I bought a Western Digital Scorpio 250GB 7200rpm drive.
Unlike the humble MacBook (where you can access the HDD from the battery bay), the MBP requires quite a strip down to get at the drive, and I needed a couple of extra tools for the job (a “spudger” and a Torx screw driver).
I have been wary of swapping parts for quite a while now, ever since I fried my beloved Amiga 2000 after trapping a cable in the casing when reassembling, so I was quite nervous as I started to follow the instructions from iFixIt. In fact, when I got to the step of “you may need to rock the case up and down to free the front of the upper case”, and I couldn’t free it, I was getting somewhat worried.
The “spudger” was an absolute must, especially when loosening the adhesive securing the sleep light and IR sensor ribbon cable to the top of the old hard drive (I’m sure the design makes sense to someone).
Eventually we had everything back together (Alison was a great help putting back the tiny 1mm long Phillips screws).
My heart stopped when I powered the laptop up, and just had a gray screen, and then leapt back into life when the boot process finally realised there was nothing on the hard drive and gave me other options.
My experience of recovering from the Time Capsule was a bit mixed. I store my Time Machine backup on my personal share on the Time Capsule, and I couldn’t get the option to restore from backup to see it (later I discovered I was using the wrong account password for the Time Capsule, and it may have been this that was stopping it from appearing). So, I plumped for a fresh install of Leopard and then using the Migration Assistant to recover the Time Machine backup. This went flawlessly, but was much more time consuming than I was expecting since I needed to upgrade Leopard to 10.5.4 (a 500MB+ download) before starting with Migration Assistant. Also, the first backup was 50GB, I assume because everything was freshly rebuilt by then.
Anyhow, the impressive thing was getting back all my software, settings – everything. My old Mac was back.
tags: hard drive mac time machine |