Tuesday, December 22, 2009

Remove or upgrade a Macbook Pro hard drive

I had a user with a Macbook Pro who had a hard drive that was about to fail. The hard drive was almost full too, so I wanted to make sure to upgrade it in the process. I was surprised at how easy it was to do, and found a very helpful guide with pictures for disassembling the Macbook. Normally I'd repost the disassembly instructions here, but the guide at www.extremetech.com was done so well I'll redirect you there instead.

I removed the existing hard drive using the guide, then cloned it to the new hard drive using Disk Utility from a Mac desktop. I put one of the drives right inside the case, and used a SATA to USB converter  (~$20 for a combo IDE 2.5", IDE 3.5", and SATA to USB, and well worth it) to plug the other drive in. From there I was able to restore the existing drive on to the new drive. It looks like even though the new drive had a much larger partition (80GB existing to a 250GB new drive), Disk Utility took care of that as well and I have a full 250GB of usable space on the new drive after the restore. After I put it all back together and booted up the laptop, everything seems to be working ok and now the user has an extra 160GB to fill up and the clicking is gone.

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