How difficult - removing 250g drive from Mac Pro, installing OS discs on new drive

[Sean Dempsey]

I have a Mac Pro arriving tomorrow. It is coming with the 250gig drive with the OS and freebie apps installed (like ilife and such).

I currently have these drives waiting:

- 150g Raptor
- 320g barracuda
- 320g barracuda

and of course, if I remove the 250, I'll have that too. 4 drives total.


I am considering removing the existing 250 and putting the Raptor in as the boot drive, but my problem is that I've never worked with a Mac like this before, and I have never installed the OS on a mac.

Will the Mac Pro come with all the CD's needed to reinstall it just like it arrived from the factory? Or will I be missing out on the ilife software that is pre installed? Also, does anyone foresee any issues with drivers or the OS install not recognizing something?

I don't want to try and get fancy with the Mac Pro the first day I get it, and turn it into a doorstop by trying to replace the boot hard drive and reinstall the OS when I don't know what I am doing. But, this will be a VERY heavy use workstation for graphic design and web design, so I was thinking that the Raptor would be a great boost for the OS and application drive.

Or am I crazy, and the Raptor should be used as a scratch disk, and maybe partitioned for some fast access storage as well?

 

[robbieduncan]

All Macs ship with restore DVDs that will resinstall the OS and ALL bundled software to the exact condition it was when it left the factory. There will be no driver issues: that's the beauty of a Mac: one company controls the OS and the hardware.

Removing the drive should be very easy. The Mac Pro is designed to make this a simple task.

 

[SDDave2007]

here is what I did with mine... it was a piece of cake.
I bought the MacPro with just the 250gig in it... Then bought two 400gig drives from Frys ($79ea)..

Follow these steps

1) Download SUPERDUPER onto your 250 gig drive and install it.
2) turn off the computer
3) install new drive into Bay 2
4) restart computer
5) run SuperDuper and clone the 250 to the new Drive
6) turn off the computer
7) swap drive bays [you may not really need to do this, but I like things orderly]
8) restart computer
9) set up new drive as boot device
10) reformat the 250

bada-bing.... anything you had installed before is still there... just on a bigger drive now

then install the other drives and format them