Macbook Hard Drive Swap (And Time Machine Rules)
This week I let a friend of mine talk me into taking his Western Digital Scorpio drive from his laptop and swapping out my old 120 gb in my Macbook for the 250 gb one. My 13" black Macbook is now over 3 years old and still going strong, but the lack of space had been getting annoying as I was constantly having to offload precious files to various disks, flash drives, etc. My Western Digital Passport drive was kept strictly for performing Time Machine backups--and, boy, am I glad I did!
The swap itself was not hard at all. Using a whitepaper from Mac, the swap was incredibly simple. The only hangup I had was a star driver was required to remove the housing from the hard drive (thin metal casing with pull tab). So, if you're going to do this make sure you have a tiny one handy. It really is "plug and play", though, and nothing special needs to be done.
Next, came the fun part--the restore from Time Machine. All I had to was plug in my external backup drive via usb, boot up the laptop with the Snow Leopard CD, run the disk utility to format the hard drive (GUID format), then pick my language and restore! I highly advise reading this helpful article from Gizmodo on doing a Time Machine restore. There is something funky you need to do before restoring. Other than that, the restore took about an hour and a half, and I was up and running with a complete, seamless restore! Time machine worked flawlessly!
I was originally very upset at the thought of having to remove beloved baby pics from iPhoto, favorite vids and music from iTunes, etc. Now, this isn't nearly as much of a concern as I now have over 120 gigs of free space!
Overall, the whole process took about 2 hours from start to finish, with less than 5 minutes of that being to replace the hardware.
Once again, Mac did not let me down.
