Dr. StrangeMac or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Install a Bigger Hard Drive

“Oh my goodness- my laptop has turned itself inside out!”

You wouldn’t believe how often we hear that– but in this pic, it’s merely what our favorite early-style MacBook Pro looks like when you open it up to swap out the hard drive. The original 160GB drive was getting long in the tooth, we have a thing for preventative maintenance, and our local shop (Central Computers) was having a sale on fast 2.5″ 500GB drives, so it was an easy call to go ahead with the change. We thought we’d share our procedure– including migrating existing data to the new drive- in case you want or need to do likewise.

1. Purchase your new drive, and gather together the tools you’ll need. This includes a Phillips-head screwdriver (small enough to fit in those tiny screws around the edge of your Mac); a #6 Torx driver (available at Cole Hardware); a tweezers or bottle-nosed pliers (in case you drop a tiny screw someplace tight); a Firewire cable (400 or 800); a second Intel Mac (which you should be reading this on right now if you’re about to begin the operation); and an external 2.5″ SATA bridge– either a small enclosure you’ve disassembled, or a purpose-built one like this, or both, which is what we did.

2. Make coffee. Read all the way through these instructions (and these) at least once. Drink some of your coffee.

3. Attach your new drive to your bridge or Black Widow unit, plug it into your 2nd Mac, and power it on. Open up Disk Utility (in your Utilities folder) and format your new drive as a “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” drive for normal OSX use.

4. On your laptop, run “Permissions Repair” in Disk Utility. When this is done, switch off the laptop, attach it to your 2nd Mac with your Firewire cable, and start it up while holding the “T” button down; this will start it in Target Mode, and mount it as a volume on your second Mac.

5. You can now clone your old system and user(s) onto the new drive. We used SuperDuper!, but Carbon Copy Cloner will also do the trick. Note that you must use a utility for this step– simply dragging and dropping will leave most of your system behind, and result in a non-bootable drive. SuperDuper! is nice because it has a Permissions Repair function as part of the cloning script, so if you use it, you can skip that step from #4. This may take a while, so drink some more coffee and check out some of the links on the right side of this page.

6. When that operation completed, we ran Disk Warrior on the new drive (from our 2nd Mac, on which it was already installed), to create a new directory and give it that minty-fresh feel. While this is not strictly required, Disk Warrior is an excellent addition to any Mac user’s toolbox, and is highly recommended.

7. With that completed, you are ready to install your cloned, optimized drive into your laptop. Unmount it from your 2nd Mac (drag its icon to the Trash), and shut it down by pressing the power button. Unmount the new drive the same way, and set it on a clean surface to cool down. While waiting for any excessive heat to dissipate, go to this guy’s excellent directions and read them all the way through- this is the core of the operation, except for a few steps we added for enhanced slickness. To wit: work on a clean, smooth floor, because those screws are awfully small and at least one of them will get away from you. If it falls far, it will bounce or otherwise hide, and then you’re scre… well, you know. Also, disregard the last page of his instructions, the substance of which we already performed, so that if there was a problem with the new drive, we’d know about it before we spent an hour and possibly voiding our warranty in putting a dead drive in a live Mac.

Here’s the laptop open with both drives and the Torx tool. Looks scary, but we’re almost done.

8. OK- you’re back. You now have the new drive in the laptop, and the old one sitting out in the open. It’s the moment of truth: time to boot up the laptop on the new drive. Go for it.

9. Good? Good! Open up the drive window and check at the bottom: it should indicate a large amount of free space remaining, as in the photo at left, which reads “456.59 GB available”. Note that our picture is not blurry, it actually looks that way, so deliriously excited are you with the success of your mission. Just kidding.

10. Now take the old drive, stick it in your external enclosure, bolt it down, and plug it in. After a couple of days, if your laptop is still working great, format it and use it for something else. Finish your coffee. Put more data on your gimungous new drive. Reflect on the rightness of the universe. Compute.

Cost of hard drive: $110

Cost of Torx multi-tool: $10

Satisfaction of installing a new, huge, fast drive into your machine, and getting a useable 160GB external drive into an enclosure you had lying around anyway:

$120