Wide Open Space
Last night I upgraded the hard drive in my Macbook Pro. This is actually quite the detailed surgery (macbook pro hard drive upgrade) which required me to buy a tiny phillips screwdriver and a torx 6 screwdriver. I was amazed at the number of tiny little screws that hold this laptop together.
However, I was even more amazed at how effortlessly I could migrate from one hard drive to another. I have done this numerous times on a Windows based PC and it is always a process I dread.
I had decided that the right path for me to was re-install the OS. I had done some stuff with bootcamp and such and since I was permanently switching to parallels I didn’t want any of that hanging around. It took about two hours from the first screw until I was up and running on a fresh install of OSX (including downloading the latest updates).
I had decided that I wanted to keep my old hard drive for external storage, so I bought a $25 usb hard drive enclosure. After putting my new hard drive in that I connected it to my Macbook and copied over my iTunes library, and other data. This took maybe 30 minutes to and hour, but I just let it crank while I worked on my Desktop in the office.
Once my data was done I began the dreaded task of re-installing the apps. Instead of trying to track down keys and CDs I just dragged the apps to my new Applications folder. Pretty much all of them ran through a “first use” type of setup, but remembered thier previous registration information, so this was very painless. Try that on a PC and you will get messages about missing registry keys or dlls.
Then I installed the latest parallels and copies over a clean windows XP image we keep around to jump start parallels installs. After activating windows, I was on my way.
This has to be the most painless migration I have ever done. Not to mention if I miss something critical on my old drive, I can still plug it into my USB slot and boot from it. Yeah, Mac’s rock.
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September 21st, 2007 at 1:49 pm
I did the exact same thing with my MacBook Pro. Ditched the 100 and put in a 160. Now, I hear there are 320 gig drives out there. Ugh.
The part I thought was weird was the fact that there was stuff taped onto the drive that had to be moved. And then stuck back when the new drive was put back on.