This week, I had to replace the Macintosh HD main disk of a Macbook running Mac OS X Snow Leopard (10.6.8). It had been nearly full. The Macbook was a rather old aluminum case macbook5.1 version from back in mid 2008.
To do the replacement I followed the youtube videos/instructions in MacBook Pro 13" 2010 Hard Drive Upgrade Tutorial and in Macbook Hard Disk Clone & Upgrade using Super Duper software from Shirt-Pocket. Using Super Duper you can do a disk cloning on the fly i.e. using the same macbook of which the disk you wish to clone. In this case the source disk was active during cloning. In a more perfect world, you could use a second Macbook(!) or do a system recovery to clone the original disk in an passive (not-active) state that is more safe.
To do the upgrade I used a Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB, 7200rpm disk that can be found here. This is a high performance SATA III disk. I also used a USB to SATA box to connect the new disk (clone) to the macbook in order to do the cloning.
It is a good practice to have an updated Time Machine backup before you start...
The upgrade steps were the following:
To do the replacement I followed the youtube videos/instructions in MacBook Pro 13" 2010 Hard Drive Upgrade Tutorial and in Macbook Hard Disk Clone & Upgrade using Super Duper software from Shirt-Pocket. Using Super Duper you can do a disk cloning on the fly i.e. using the same macbook of which the disk you wish to clone. In this case the source disk was active during cloning. In a more perfect world, you could use a second Macbook(!) or do a system recovery to clone the original disk in an passive (not-active) state that is more safe.
To do the upgrade I used a Western Digital Scorpio Black 750GB, 7200rpm disk that can be found here. This is a high performance SATA III disk. I also used a USB to SATA box to connect the new disk (clone) to the macbook in order to do the cloning.
It is a good practice to have an updated Time Machine backup before you start...
The upgrade steps were the following:
- Ensure that you have the proper tools: Torx T6 and Phillips screwdrivers.
- Ensure compatibility of the new replacement disk with the existing hardware/software.
- Download and install Super Duper or Carbon Copy Cloner (that cover a Lion Recovery petition too)
- Connect the new 2.5 inch disk using USB-SATA box to the macbook
- Run Disk Utility and select Erase to format the new disk as MacOS Extended journaled as the old one, and with the same name (usually Macintosh HD).
- Run Super Duper (or Carbon Copy Cloner - CCC that clones the Recovery partition too) and select source and target disk carefully (!!!) to clone the old volume to the new USB connected.
- After waiting some hours (for a 160GB original volume the process lasts about 3 hours), Super Duper finishes the process by doing the new disk bootable. You may verify this by running command line diskutil list to see that the two volumes have the same partitions and types.
- Eject the USB connect new disk and shutdown the computer.
- Remove the back cover by taking off the screws using the Philips screwdriver. In some models you do not need to unscrew the back cover because there is a small cover with a button that when pressed you can see the battery and hard disk.
- Remove the battery
- Unscrew the protecting arm of the hard disk
- Slide up the hard disk and unplug it slowly and carefully
- Unscrew the 4 screws using the Torx. Screw them into the new disk
- Plug the new hard disk into the motherboard channel and mount it.
- Protect the disk with the protecting arm
- Remount the battery
- Close the cover
- Start up Macbook
- Test the new disk
- A rather long delay is expected in startup before displaying the Apple logo. To resolve this restart the Macbook by holding down Command, Option, P and R keys until you here the startup sound for a second time. After that restart the machine and the delay should be normal. Using this combination a reset of NVRAM/PRAM is accomplished. It is a good practice to do this because there is a change in hardware. In my case, there was an 80 sec delay in startup that was reduced to 30 seconds!
- Time Machine is not expected to continue to work for the new clone disk volume. One of the reasons is that the disk UUID is different (see Disk Utility). In Mac OS X 10.6.8, even if you fix it (update the UUID in Time Machine volume using xattr etc. - see references below) there are situations that it is not going to work. If you clone your Time Machine volume too (!), you have nothing to loose and you may try it. Be careful! Backup of the Time Machine volume is required because if you try to use the old Time Machine volume with the new source volume clone you may loose old backups in an attempt of TM to find space to create a new full backup from scratch!!!... In any case, you may use a new Time Machine backup volume for the new cloned volume and keep the old TM backups for the old original volume. For Mac OS Lion and beyond there is a command line utility called tmutil that can make the xattr/fsaclctl better... TM continuity is the most critical issue in the above process in addition with the disk selection for compatibility.
- After the replacement the machine runs faster and the boot time has been reduced to 33 seconds instead of 50 to 70 seconds that was with the old disk...
- How do I continue to use Time Machine backups after switching my hard disk?
- How can I use an existing Time Machine backup with my new computer?
- How do I get Time Machine working again after changing my hard drive?
- Copying a volume via the Restore tab of Disk Utility
- How to get fsaclctl off your Leopard install DVD
- Time Machine and tmutil for Lion and beyond
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