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I am planning on upgrading my HDD and RAM, can this be done at the same time? In other words can I follow the steps you lay out and also put more RAM in the computer while it is open? Thanks
 
Help...not sure what I did wrong or how to correct.

I have a new 1 TB hard drive that I have in an external case to make sure this worked before opening up my Macbook Pro and changing. I followed the procedure and formatted the new hard drive in the external case, then I installed Lion on the external hard drive and all seems to be working well.

Every time I restart my Mac I am opening into the new hard drive, although my issue is the admin user name and password. When I login at the restart I see my user already in the box and my old password works, although when I try to migrate, or access anything in require admin user name and password I see a empty user and password box and will not accept my user name and password.

I have tried looking in the user area and I do see myself as admin with the proper user name, picture, etc. I can change the old password to a new password, but still receive the blank box if I try to do anything else as for admin privileges and the system will not accept my user name and password. Only thing I might see as a issue is my user name has spaces (ex: Run Up Hill) although it has never been a issue in the past.

Do I need to have the new hard drive inside my Macbook verses as exterior?

Please help...


As replacing the internal Hard Disk Drive (HDD) of a MacBook (MB) or MacBook Pro (MBP) is an ongoing issue, I decided to make a small guide on how to replace the HDD on those machines and how to properly get your data and even the Operating System (OS) to the new HDD.
The same can be applied for replacing an HDD with an SSD, but further precautions may have to be taken to get an SSD to properly work.

____________________________________________________________
 
When one wants to upgrade an internal HDD with a new one, the new HDD or SSD needs to be formatted properly.]

PS: GUID is the partition map scheme for Intel Macs, if you us this guide for a PPC Mac, use "Apple Partition Map" as explained in the screenshot.

Thank you, this seems to have worked great.
 
I believe I have done a great deal of research but I have one nagging concern before I place an online order for a new HD. When on amazon reading reviews about a drive I was going to buy, I read that one buyer had an issue with an older 2006 MacBook 1,1 Intel Core Duo 2 Ghz machine.

Although I have read that SATA II drives are backward compatible to SATA I machines (controllers) this user did not find that to be the case. The SATA II drive sent too much data at 3.0 Gbps and did not step it down to 1.5 Gbps. The HDD upgrade failed and they stepped down to a 5400 RPM drive.

I had intended to get a new 7200 RPM 500 or 1T HDD but now I am not sure. We are out of space with the 60 GB Toshiba drive. Currently we're running 10.4.11 but with a new HDD installed we planed to move up to 10.5 or 10.6

Here was the bad review on the drive I was going to buy.

Advice welcome.
 
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Hi All,

This is a really informative thread. I am just about to upgrade my 4-year-old hard drive to the Momentus XT 750GB. I have so far cloned the drive to the Momentus whilst it was housed in an external enclosure. I intend on installing the cloned drive tomorrow evening.

Before I do, I wanted to check that it is OK to install with a different name? When I formatted the Momentus drive with the correct Mac Journaled preference, I named it 'Momentus'. Should I have done this, or does it need to be named 'Macintosh HD' so the system correctly recognises it once installed?

One other thing I read was that many people choose a clean install for a hard drive upgrade. Do any users here recommend this? If so, is it worth the potential difficulties of installing Mountain Lion on a new bootable drive and then having to tinker with transferring iPhoto/iTunes library files? The reason I ask is that I imagine a restore from my Time Machine backups would degrade the benefits of a OS clean install.

Thanks in advance for any feedback. Cheers.
 
Hi All,

This is a really informative thread. I am just about to upgrade my 4-year-old hard drive to the Momentus XT 750GB. I have so far cloned the drive to the Momentus whilst it was housed in an external enclosure. I intend on installing the cloned drive tomorrow evening.

Before I do, I wanted to check that it is OK to install with a different name? When I formatted the Momentus drive with the correct Mac Journaled preference, I named it 'Momentus'. Should I have done this, or does it need to be named 'Macintosh HD' so the system correctly recognises it once installed?

One other thing I read was that many people choose a clean install for a hard drive upgrade. Do any users here recommend this? If so, is it worth the potential difficulties of installing Mountain Lion on a new bootable drive and then having to tinker with transferring iPhoto/iTunes library files? The reason I ask is that I imagine a restore from my Time Machine backups would degrade the benefits of a OS clean install.

Thanks in advance for any feedback. Cheers.

you can do whatever you can name your Momentus XT
 
Install success

I successfully cloned my old drive and have installed the new upgrade. The system is all working fine, but there is a peculiar discrepancy in storage space which concerns me. My old drive was 320gb, and I've now moved to 750gb. My old drive was full to 310gb, but the new drive is registering 470gb of space free. That means there are over 40gb of data unaccounted for.

Is there anything in the cloning process which doesn't get moved across? I can't find anything missing, and both my iPhoto and iTunes libraries look correct, which accounted for most of the storage space on my previous drive.

Any thoughts/feedback much appreciated. Cheers, Tim
 
When one wants to upgrade an internal HDD with a new one, the new HDD or SSD needs to be formatted properly.
The same steps can be applied for external HDDs and SSDs, that are meant to store a bootable copy of Mac OS X.
Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make a 1:1 copy of Mac OS X onto an external HDD.



Open Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility or start Disk Utility from the grey Restore DVD or any Retail version of Mac OS X:
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image
_____________________________________________________
GUID is the partition map scheme for Intel Macs, if you us this guide for a PPC Mac, use "Apple Partition Map" as explained in the screenshot.
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image

Wow, way to go above and beyond! I think you should create your own thread for this! (I can't remember, do they have stickies on this forum?)
 
When one wants to upgrade an internal HDD with a new one, the new HDD or SSD needs to be formatted properly.
The same steps can be applied for external HDDs and SSDs, that are meant to store a bootable copy of Mac OS X.
Use CarbonCopyCloner or SuperDuper to make a 1:1 copy of Mac OS X onto an external HDD.



Open Applications / Utilities / Disk Utility or start Disk Utility from the grey Restore DVD or any Retail version of Mac OS X:
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image
_____________________________________________________
GUID is the partition map scheme for Intel Macs, if you us this guide for a PPC Mac, use "Apple Partition Map" as explained in the screenshot.
Image
_____________________________________________________​
Image
Thank You, I ask because there is all this talk about not being able to clone Lion or Mountain Lion completely, something gets left behind.
 
this all was so valuable to me, thanks everybody!

I am going through the same thing now, (hampered ever so slightly by just enough dyslexia to get me dizzy). I have the stock HD in my own 2009 Mac Pro, and an external HD, and I will be installing a new SSD soon - this exchange is just what I was looking for. Simsaladimbamba, thanks for the patient guide there!
 
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