Comments on David Alison's Blog: Upgrading the hard drive on my MacBook

Informative, good read.

2009-12-07T04:24:05.001-05:00

Informative, good read.

Thanks for sharing the process. That specific West...

2009-09-10T18:15:07.458-04:00

Thanks for sharing the process. That specific Western Digital hard drive is now $65. I think I'll go for it!

Interesting tidbit about The Time Machine method, ...

2008-12-04T23:28:00.000-05:00

Interesting tidbit about The Time Machine method, or really any of these methods, they can be used to restore to completely different hardware too. I had an Intel Mac Mini backed up via Time Machine, and wanted to shift that over to an older PowerPC mini. All I did was the process above, and even though the machine had a completely different CPU and everything, it worked fine. Everything was where I left it from the Intel Mac, and everything ran fine.

Thanks for the info, this is the exact hard drive ...

2008-07-08T17:47:00.000-04:00

Thanks for the info, this is the exact hard drive i am looking at buying and i wanted to make sure it works for my macbook before buying it.

FYI, rather than using a specialized hdd copy prog...

2008-03-14T16:06:00.000-04:00

FYI, rather than using a specialized hdd copy program, you could have used a Time Machine backup to rebuild your machine. Just make sure it's a full backup, then when you boot off the install disc choose the "Install from Time Machine backup" option in the top menu (I'm going from memory on the wording).

I've done this reinstall-from-TM approach twice, once while replacing the main hard drive, and it worked very well. It had the added benefit of clearing out all of my "useless" files like tmp files and cache files that are not backed up by TM.

Wow - thanks Tom. Some great information in there....

2008-03-14T14:38:00.000-04:00

Wow - thanks Tom. Some great information in there.

The startup delay wasn't anything EFI level, it wa...

2008-03-14T14:25:00.000-04:00

The startup delay wasn't anything EFI level, it was OS X booting without any caches. Carbon Copy Cloner clones all the important stuff, but leaves out the caches for drivers and some other things, to allow the copy to work with fewer issues on any machine.

There are other ways to do what you did as well, but only using built in OS X methods. I'll outline them here, as they are handy to know for disaster recovery as well:

1. Take out the existing drive and put it in the USB enclosure
2. Put the new drive in the machine, without partitioning/formatting
3. Boot off the OS X DVD (put it in, then hold Option on bootup to get a boot menu), and use Disk Utility (In the Utilities menu) to do the initial partition/format
4. Do a normal OS X install, and this might be a handy time to uncheck the gigs of unneeded printer drivers or languages.
5. When the install completes, it will ask if you have another mac. Tell it yes, and select the option to copy from another drive. Plug in the USB enclosure, and it will allow you to pull over all your apps, settings, and data.

The other method involves having a Time Machine backup.

1. Boot off the OS X DVD
2. In the menus once it boots to the initial install screen is a restore from Time Machine option. This will reimage the entire system back to where it was when it was backed up. Apps, settings, everything. With a Time Capsule, this even works over a network in a supported way, and there are ways to do this with 3rd party NAS devices too.

Interesting tidbit about The Time Machine method, or really any of these methods, they can be used to restore to completely different hardware too. I had an Intel Mac Mini backed up via Time Machine, and wanted to shift that over to an older PowerPC mini. All I did was the process above, and even though the machine had a completely different CPU and everything, it worked fine. Everything was where I left it from the Intel Mac, and everything ran fine.

Third solution is to use Disk Utility to clone the drive, basically boot off the OS X DVD with both drives attached, and run it via the utilities menu. There is a restore tab, and yo can drag the source and destination drives and hit go.

There are many other methods, digging into the Unix side, but those are just 3 quick ones to give you an idea of how flexible restoring can be.

Vito: Funny you mention that today - I was just re...

2008-02-17T21:43:00.000-05:00

Vito: Funny you mention that today - I was just reading up on that earlier today!

I was very pleased with how quickly the drive went in - this MacBook is very nicely designed. I'll be hitting that part up again shortly when I install the additional memory I just purchased.

Glad your install went smoothly.Just to let you kn...

2008-02-17T20:02:00.000-05:00

Glad your install went smoothly.

Just to let you know, Macs do not use BIOS, they use a system called EFI.

I'm not trying to bash you, I'm just helping you out for the future. Some people might not like you saying BIOS (it is quite stone-aged).

Good luck with your new Mac, I'm glad everything is going well!