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My first open-heart surgery on a MB

evillageprowler

evillageprowler

macrumors regular
Original poster
Nov 5, 2007
178
0
NJ, USA
I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to owning and using Apple stuff; my wife owns a MB C2D 2.0GHz and I just own an IPT16G. My wife doesn't really let me use her MB, so my experience with Mac's is pretty limited.

My wife does a lot of video editing on her MB and constantly has to transfer her projects to her PC's shared drive. It's quite annoying to her always to be so tight on disk space, so I bought her a 250G internal disk as an upgrade.

This afternoon, I decided to embark on the project. I got her notebook, her Tiger discs and other gadgetry. Replacing the disk was easy via the instructions from iFixit. I then loaded the Tiger discs and was easily able to format the new disk and load the OS. It took some time, but that's to be expected. Near the end, it even asked me if I wanted to transfer information from another disk. I attached the original 80G disk via USB and the transfer program proceeded to move all sorts of data from the old to the new disk.

Everything was so easy... I was able to replicate my wife's account and all her installed programs and data. Easy as pie...

Gotta love :apple:

:)

Next weekend -- upgrade to Leopard and then use a 500G external Simpletech drive for TM.

EVP
 
evillageprowler said:
I'm pretty much a noob when it comes to owning and using Apple stuff; my wife owns a MB C2D 2.0GHz and I just own an IPT16G. My wife doesn't really let me use her MB, so my experience with Mac's is pretty limited.

My wife does a lot of video editing on her MB and constantly has to transfer her projects to her PC's shared drive. It's quite annoying to her always to be so tight on disk space, so I bought her a 250G internal disk as an upgrade.

This afternoon, I decided to embark on the project. I got her notebook, her Tiger discs and other gadgetry. Replacing the disk was easy via the instructions from iFixit. I then loaded the Tiger discs and was easily able to format the new disk and load the OS. It took some time, but that's to be expected. Near the end, it even asked me if I wanted to transfer information from another disk. I attached the original 80G disk via USB and the transfer program proceeded to move all sorts of data from the old to the new disk.

Everything was so easy... I was able to replicate my wife's account and all her installed programs and data. Easy as pie...

Gotta love :apple:

:)

Next weekend -- upgrade to Leopard and then use a 500G external Simpletech drive for TM.

EVP
Click to expand...

Congrats mate.
 
Man I wish the MBP's had a user-replaceable drive.. Anyway - nice one mate! Glad everything went smoothly.
 
Thanks all... Yeah, it wasn't hard at all doing the physical stuff. Everything was well laid-out and the instructions on iFixit was clear and accurate. The software piece was surprisingly (for me, a relative Mac noob) painless too.

As for connecting the original 80G disk to the MB, I used some gadget that has all sorts of external connectors for all types of possibilities. I'm at work now, but I'll post the exact gadget that I used when I have a free moment tonight.

EVP
 
Congrats! It's very simple to upgrade computers by reading the manual if your not sure.
 
Congrats it is a very easy computer to upgrade ram and hd wise.

FYI

You could've made it slightly easier and probably quicker for yourself if you followed this procedure.

Install drive
Connect old internal to the computer
Hold down option at start and boot from the external drive
Then use disk utility to format the internal drive
Then use Superduper/CCC to clone the external to the internal.
 
xUKHCx: thx; will try that next time... Is superduper/ccc part of the std os distro? and, will it make the other drive a bootable drive?

EVP
 
xUKHCx said:
Congrats it is a very easy computer to upgrade ram and hd wise.

FYI

You could've made it slightly easier and probably quicker for yourself if you followed this procedure.

Install drive
Connect old internal to the computer
Hold down option at start and boot from the external drive
Then use disk utility to format the internal drive
Then use Superduper/CCC to clone the external to the internal.
Click to expand...

Whould'nt this work also?

put new drive in enclosure
copy over os
boot from external
if ok swap
 
xUKHCx said:
thanks for clearing it up
Click to expand...
Glad to help. :)

xUKHCx said:
Yes it would and is perhaps the more prudent way of doing it, and in fact is the way I will be recommending it in the future as well as following myself.
Click to expand...
I see both ways as being viable.

However, I would agree. It does seem best to clone to an external, that way if the clone doesn't work or the hard drive is bad, you can still use the laptop as a laptop without something hanging from it.
 
SATA/IDE to USB adapter

For those who asked, the adapter I used to connect my original 80G disk to the MB via USB is by Vantec, model CB-ISATAU2. It supports 2.5", 3.5" and 5.25" IDE/SATA drives. According to the packaging, it currently supports up to 500G -- including ATA/ATAPI-7 and LBA-48. It cost me under $50 (I truly forget the amount) from Cyberguys.com.

It works like a charm on XP and Tiger. I suspect it'll work fine on Linux, but I haven't had a need to try yet. I had a problem getting it to work on Vista, but I never tried to see if loading drivers or whatnot would've helped. (It probably can be made to work with a small amount of effort, but I truly despise Vista and try to avoid it like the plague.)

This is the best sub-$50 I ever spent...

EVP
 
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