upgrading ram and hdd on macbook late 2008 (macbook5,1)

[happydude]

wondering if anyone out there would mind sharing story/advice on upgrading your macbook/macbook pro hdd and ram. ram is relatively easy, i'm not worried about that. more so the hdd, and the process involved, i.e. either cloning old hard drive onto new one and how you did it, or fresh installing on new one and using migration assistant.

tips, advice, suggestions?

thanks.

 

[GGJstudios]

An easy approach is this:

1. Buy the new HDD in an external enclosure
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal drive to the new external drive
3. Swap the drives
4. Your old drive can now serve as an external drive, for backups or additional storage.

 

[Designer Dale]

^^^ That,s what I did with my pre unibody MBP. Late 08 4,1. It was a little spooky dealing with the tiny screws, but this old man did it.

OWC aka macsales.com has videos. Ifixit.com does too. The web is your friend.

Dale

 

[dmcdayton]

Just upgraded mini, went well with owc videos and products

 

[Sonhascome]

An easy approach is this:

1. Buy the new HDD in an external enclosure
2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner to make a bootable clone of your internal drive to the new external drive
3. Swap the drives
4. Your old drive can now serve as an external drive, for backups or additional storage.

this will help you do it, or if you prefer not to do this time machine will serve the function as well.

 

[simsaladimbamba]

this will help you do it, or if you prefer not to do this time machine will serve the function as well.

But Time Machine will take longer. The initial backup process sadly takes longer than cloning the HDD. And TM involves a third HDD, which some people sometimes don't have. And restoring from a TM backup will take time again, making the computer unusable during that time.

Upgrading RAM in MacBooks and MacBook Pros​

MacBook, MacBook Pro: Replacing the Hard Disk Drive, transferring data to the new HDD​

How to format a new HDD/SSD to install Mac OS X or make a bootable copy onto​