Replaced My Laptop Internal Hard Drive Today Quick summary of the operation proceedure

[Watermonkey 0]

I bought this MacBook Pro over 15 months ago and it came with a 160GB (149.1 GB in real terms) Hitachi Hard drive that spins at 5400 RPM and is a bit noisy for whatever reason. Yesterday, UPS delivered to me two WD 320 GB (298 GB in real terms) 5400 RPM drives. The second one is for a friend who's going to pay me to install it in his Macbook Pro for him. I paid $190 each for the WD Passports off of newegg.com which, oddly, is less than the hard drive without the Passport enclosure.First challenge was getting the enclosures open without breaking them. There are no screws, it's just two pieces of plastic that snap together so I managed to get my fingernail between the pieces then put the plastic end of a spudger in and just ran it down the length until one side was separated from the other. Without too much work, I had the top separated from the bottom. Then it was just a matter of removing the sticky-backed aluminum foil from the drive and unplugging it from the small circuit board it is attached to giving it a USB interface. Then it was time for the computer.The MacBook Pro is an intimidating computer for the uninitiated, but, trust me, it's really not a big deal to tear into it at all. One needs to have another computer open, though, and be viewing the website, https://www.ifixit.com/ to view the step-by-step instructions. Be sure you use the exact tools they list there or you might strip a screw, which would be a pity. This computer has at least four screws that I can recall removing and replacing that have the #6 Torx interface. This is not an easy tool to find and I had to specially order one last summer when I was at car quest in a neighboring town. I think the little socket cost several dollars too. Quite expensive when you can buy a pair of the more common sizes for $.39 . The computer came apart just about exactly as the instructions said it would and I was able to complete the procedure without any complications or damage.Before I did all this, though, I had to clone the drive from my old drive. I downloaded a small program called Carbon Copy Cloner and used that program to clone the drive to one of the partitions of my new drive. Before I did that, though, I used the disk utility program that is a part of OS X to partition the new drive. I decided to give the Mac side a partition of 220 GB (real) and use the rest for the Windoz side in anticipation of one day installing XP so I can use this computer for work instead of using my work computer which has been kidnapped by my wife. So one partition is formatted with the HFS+ Mac file system and the other partition, just under 80 GB, is FAT32. So, in the end, it's almost like I gained a whole new computer with an 80gig HD while also gaining 71 GB or so space on my Mac HD. Not bad for under $200. My friend will gain even more since his current drive is only 80 GB! And he's running Windoz on one of his partitions too!One thing I have to comment on is that this new drive is QUICK compared to the old one. Noticeably so. Furthermore, it's dead silent. You can't hear the arm moving or the drive spinning or anything. The old drive made itself audibly known whenever it was spinning. It's almost like starting a new $50k car versus a 1977 Chevy or something. I have to look at the tachometer on some cars I rent to see if the engine is running or not. Not like the cars I own at all!

[Saint_Michael 3]

So I take it that the individual partition copying work successful then or haven't gone that far yet? Usually notebook hard drives are pretty silent, but you can hear the hard drive reading or writing if you have no ambient sounds cover overing it though. With Western Digital though they are practically silent and fast compared to some of the other big name brands, but with the amount of time you put into that hard drive yeah it would slow down over time due to wear and tear. So the newer ones will always be faster then the one your replacing.

[Watermonkey 0]

Yeah, using the Disk Utility program that comes on the Mac from the factory, I just created two partitions and formatted them to the appropriate theme (FAT32 or HFS+) and then I just cloned my, then, internal drive right onto the new drive partition. The free program actually crashed just after it was half way through, though, so I had to kill it and start over. The first time I didn't think to overwrite everything that was on the drive out of the box, second time I did, though, and it didn't crash on me. Took nearly three hours to complete the 109 GB transfer and, except for "Mail" having to re-build some folder or another, which it did after I gave it permission, I haven't seen any data corruption or problems whatsoever. I'm just ecstatic that it all worked because that's a whole lot of data to worry about!So now I've got two partitions which appear to me to be two separate drives and one of them is ready for me to install XP onto. I just need to find a copy of XP I can use now. Don't really feel like paying for it though...

[BuffaloHelp 24]

Ah! A topic like this would have been perfect with pictures to accompanying your post :oNot only a good tutorial how to change/swap hard drives for Mac Powerbook(s) but I would love to see the inside of any laptop.Nice post! I'm sure it will help someone to perform a clean DYI project.

[FLaKes 0]

Nice, congratulations on changing the hard drive on your laptop. What is the speed of your new hard drive? I am guessing it could be a 7200rpm hard drive since you stated that it is quick compared to the old one. I also updated the hard drive in my laptop, but mine is a hewlett packard laptop. It was really easy to swap the hard drive on it.

[rayzoredge 2]

Ah! A topic like this would have been perfect with pictures to accompanying your post
Not only a good tutorial how to change/swap hard drives for Mac Powerbook(s) but I would love to see the inside of any laptop.

Nice post! I'm sure it will help someone to perform a clean DYI project.

x2

Laptops in themselves are intimidating to take apart, since they're not exactly easy to get into in the first place. The lack of readily-available documentation and the fact that everyone's afraid of stripping screws, breaking enclosure parts, and whatnot keep most people away from doing just that.

Kudos to Watermonkey for initiating what most people wouldn't even dare think of. But then again, it's much better to do that than to just junk it and buy a new laptop... financially, anyway.

I took apart my Dell Inspiron 8600 a couple of years ago to rip out a video card from a Dell Latitude and upgrade my Inspiron (from a NVIDIA 64MB to a 128MB card). It actually isn't that hard, in my opinion... but like Watermonkey mentions, you have to be careful with parts.

[Watermonkey 0]

Lessons learned:I'll take some pictures and add them to this thread in the near future. It's quite an amazing machine internally. I learned the lessons on my own machine, unfortunately, so my friend is up and running without a problem, with all his programs and files intact. First thing is when you go to partition a hard drive in the Disk Utility software, there's a button called "options" you need to click and you need to select "GUID" formatting or the drive will not work when it comes to it. What I mean by that is it'll work if you clone your internal drive onto it, but when you go to actually install Leopard, it'll do things and may even start to install but it won't be successful. Which will destroy all the information on the drive and make it unusable. This happened to me. I tried to install leopard onto the internal 160 GB hard drive and for some reason that didn't work either. Then I tried to, just 'cause, install it on to my large backup drive Mac partition, but it's external and it didn't take there either, but it managed to cripple it. So, I breathed a heavy sigh of defeat two days ago and put the 160 GB drive on USB and installed OSX 10.4.0 from the discs that came with the computer. Then I installed Leopard. Keep in mind, in doing so, I destroyed all my files and settings, etc. that I had on that disc in doing those two things. Then I went online and installed all the updates, the largest of which was the 300+++ MB update to bring the OS up to 10.5.2. Now that disc was all good. I then migrated all my apps and files that I could salvage from the 300 GB drive onto the 160 GB drive because I was about to do the same to it. When I brought it up to 10.5.2 (Leopard begins at 10.5.0), though, the install program actually asked me if I had a disc that had files and apps that needed to be transferred over. D'oh! Oh well, so I let it do it's thing to just in case I missed something. So, basically I was able to save some things so it's not like I had to start over from scratch, and the large storage volume, the 500 GB WD external drive connected via firewire, while crippled, is actually, very slowly, transferring over all my mp3s that I thought I lost. I didn't realize before that I actually had about 27 GB worth of mp3s on the other drives but the external drive has around 65 GB of mp3s, so it's well worth it for me to be patient. Then I've got a lot of pictures I need to save and some documents and things like that that shouldn't take much to transfer over. Then I can wipe it, repair it, and start using it as a backup again, this time making sure it, too, has the correct formatting. But, get this: I now have a Windoz partition on this computer running a very stable XP SP2 Home edition!I met my friend at the library at about 11:30am to begin the whole operation. I still hadn't completed doing everything to my computer and since I had formatted his new hard drive the same way I'd formatted mine, I had to remove it and re-install his original drive and begin again from scratch. For some reason his little drive wasn't working in the WD enclosure the 320 GB drive came in. Strange, so I put it in my enclosure that was powering my original drive just fine. No luck. A sinking feeling came over me. What if his original drive with all his files and mp3s had died... Well, what the hell, I put it back in to his computer, connected the top panel (keyboard and trackpad) and put it back in service without putting all the screws back in place. Voila! It worked inside the computer just fine. Weird... So I installed Leopard on it, ran software update, went to a meeting at 5:30pm, came back with time to spare before it was finished downloading the OS update on the library's slow DSL connection, and ran bootcamp (the main reason for upgrading to Leopard is it's the only way to get bootcamp anymore). Now, bootcamp partitions the drive to create a Windoz partition without destroying your Mac side. Pretty neat, I thought. I had created the partitions before myself thinking that was the way to do it, but Disk Utility won't let you create one partition formatted GUID and the other formatted to run Windoz, so that's when I figured I'd better just create one partition and hope Bootcamp will handle the rest. There was one other thing, after we cloned the original HD onto the now correctly formatted new hard drive, I put the new hard drive back into his computer and closed it up. I'd spent a couple hours installing Windoz on my computer while we were cloning his hard drive earlier in the day, so by the time we got around to doing his I was a Pro. When it asks you if you want to keep the FAT32 formatting or change it to NTFS, even though it warns you NTFS will cause you to be unable to run more than one OS on the drive, it's not aware that there's another partition on the drive already with OS X on it. All the Windoz software sees is its 80 GB FAT partition and so it thinks that's the entire hard drive. So you have to ignore that warning and go ahead and tell it to change it to NTFS. That was the only big hang-up with the Windoz install. Such a little OS compared to the new Leopard which comes on a DVD! So, then I installed his copy of MS Office and my copy of MS Streets and Trips and now I've been moving some files and apps from the hard drive that was on my last Windoz computer I used at work but returned to Costco after having it for several years. Then I've still got to move files over from the Dell and when all that's done, I'll have my work computer right here with my home computer. I just hope I'm able to recover all my pics and files off this slow-as-molassas external drive...Oh, and ya'll might be wondering when we got out of the library. It closed at 8pm that night and we left with about two minutes to spare. Whew! Never did figure out why his Hatachi 120 GB drive doesn't like the WD enclosure. I told him he'd probably have to cough up $15 and buy another cheap enclosure and hope it works inside that...Oh, and FlaKes: It's 5400 RPM, but it's so densely packed it makes it much faster than a lower capacity drive at the same speed.

Edited February 15, 2008 by Watermonkey (see edit history)