...and I have read from others on here that they took their apart and swapped the drive into the MB, putting the original MB drive into the enclosure. It was on sale at BB for $99 and I had a coupon, so it seemed a good deal. How good is this drive and how easy is it to pop open the Passport's case?
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Just bought 250GB WD Passport...
- Thread starter danny_w
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I did this with a 320 gig Passport.
Obviously, this is going to void your warranty on the passport. Just an FYI before we go any further.
I work in an IT office, so I actually used a dell laptop keyboard tool, basically a small black plastic putty knife to open up the passport. Though anything small enough to get between the two pieces should work.
The top cover of the passport is just snapped onto the bottom piece, so you just need to pry them apart, no screws or anything that I remember.
There's some really good videos on youtube. I think I just searched for Passport disassembly.
I got it installed last night and it was a breeze. Opening the case was the hardest part, but not too difficult; the outer U-shaped case unsnapped around the edges and slid off from the inner backbone holding the drive. It is a WD2500BEVS (the 8MB cache version) and I got it all for about $80! I cloned my internal drive to it, installed it into my MB, and then created a 20GB Bootcamp partition (empty). I had a backup of an earlier Bootcamp partition using WinClone, so I merely restored that. The only problem so far is that the partition I created was 20GB, but the backup was 15GB, and now it says that my partition is 15GB - how do I get the other 5GB back? I will try to run PartitionMagic later today to see if it can "see" the extra space.
No, sorry I don't. I just started with the corner opposite the USB port on the top, slid my fingernail underneath the edge, and slid it along toward the front. While holding this side open I did the same thing on the bottom side. When both the top and bottom are spread apart, you can slide the inner frame out from the U-shaped outside casing. The hdd is mounted to the USB adapter and held in the inner frame by 4 rubber pads. Just slip the assembly out of the frame and slide the drive out. Reverse the process with your old drive if you want to reuse the case.
BTW, I couldn't find any decent pictures of the process; they were all too fuzzy and hard to see.
Does anybody know how I can get my 5GB of space back (see above) without completely reinstalling everything?