New Hard Drive for early 2008 Macbook

[statistical]

My son has an early 2008 Macbook and the Hitachi drive in it appears to be dead.

I have read a number of postings on how to change the drive but my question is what drive can I use?

The old drive is a Hitachi 5k250-160; 160GB SATA 1.5Gb/s. The stickers on it say that it has Apple Firmware 2007 on board.

Can I replace it with any similar sized drive up to 250GB or does it need to be an Apple specific drive?

Once I've put the drive in do I just load it from the original CDs? (I have not been using Macs for very long and this is the first time that I will be oing anything like this.)

Thanks in advance.

 

[spinnerlys]

You can put in any 2.5" S-ATA HDD with a maximum height of 9.5mm, which makes the largest HDD you can use around 750GB.

If you also get an external HDD enclosure for 2.5" HDDs (connected via USB, after you put the old or new HDD into it), you can use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make an exact copy of the old HDD to the new HDD, than switch the HDDs and boot from the new HDD as usual. You can then use the old HDD for backups or data storage.

If you want to re-install Mac OS X, you can use Migration Assistant to migrate data from the old HDD to the new one, using that external HDD enclosure I spoke of earlier.

 

[statistical]

Many thanks for that spinnerlys.

The new hard drive went in without any problems.

As I said the old drive was broken so moving the data off it was not an option, all I have to do now is figure out how to get the music off his iPod and into iTunes! My first attempt with another iPod I had failed as it wanted to erase it before linking it to the new iTunes. I guess someone else has had this problem before so I will go and search the forums.

 

[spinnerlys]

expod is a small utility for getting songs off your iPod. iTunes does a fantastic job of copying music onto an iPod, but lacks the ability to go the other way. With expod you can copy any or all of your songs (or videos) off your iPod, using whatever file naming convention you like.
link

 

[dba7dba]

Many thanks for that spinnerlys.

The new hard drive went in without any problems.

As I said the old drive was broken so moving the data off it was not an option, all I have to do now is figure out how to get the music off his iPod and into iTunes! My first attempt with another iPod I had failed as it wanted to erase it before linking it to the new iTunes. I guess someone else has had this problem before so I will go and search the forums.

Sorry hear that.

Now you must really buy an external HD for Time Machine backup.