swapping out internal hard drive

[danny]

Hi-
I have a macbook pro with a 5400 rpm hard drive and I want to swap it out for a 7200 rpm drive I've just purchased. Can anyone suggest what steps to follow, as far as cloning my current drive contents onto the new drive?
Thanks in advance,
Danny

[dnanian]

Partition the drive properly with Disk Utility (using the "GUID" partition scheme), make a full "Backup - all files" to it. Name it the same as the original drive, swap, and that should do it.

[danny]

Thanks Dave. So, put the new drive in an enclosure first? Then clone the original drive, then remove it and put it in the computer? Thanks.

[dnanian]

Yep! You have to have a place to attach the drive, of course.

[coumerelli]

I'm doing the same thing right now, and I've done this before. I've got a laptop hard drive (2.5") that I want to upgrade but Don't have an enclosure to put it in. So, I just SuperDuper! to my regular backup (external drive), replace the internal drive, boot from the external and SuperDuper! it to the new drive. Done!

[cj3]

I assume this will work also on a MacPro? I have my data drive (My Data) separated from my main boot up drive (Macintosh HD) where all my home folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, etc.) are located and would to move it to a bigger hard drive. Is this the process that I should follow?

- Install new hard drive in one of the 4 HD slots.
- Format new hard drive. (What should I name this drive?)
- Back-up all files to this new drive.
- Swap the drives. (Is there an impact in how the hard drives are named?)

The question is how I name the new drive. And once I replace the old drive with the new drive, do I have to rename it as "My Data" and will OSX be smart enough to point to the new drive?

Sorry... recent mac convert and still learning the new OS.

[dnanian]

Name the new drive the same as the original drive, and *remove* the old one. With that, it should work fine.

[Roger sinden]

Was thinking about doing exactly the same, wasn't 100% sure how to go about it so thought I'd check the forum and voila! There's the information.

Thanks chaps.

[andys_mf]

I'm fairly new to all this and am about to upgrade my drive - but i've got a question - as I don't currently have an external drive - what are my options for backing up. I'm planning on using the existing drive as an external back up once the change is done, and have bought a hard drive enclosure for it.

Would it be possible to use this to set up the new drive first? Not sure i'm explaining this very well.

What i'm thinking is put the new drive in the enclosure and connect via usb, use disk utility to format the new drive to guid? and then use super duper to create a bootable back up on this disk?
would i be right in thinking, that if i did that, when i put the new drive in the macbook it will just start right up as if nothing had changed?

hope that all makes sense!

[dnanian]

Yes, that's basically what you can do.

[andys_mf]

wow - I can't believe how easy that was!? I attempted something similar on a PC years ago and it was an absolute nightmare!

This took about 3hrs to backup with SuperDuper, then 5 mins to swap over.

Macbook booted up the same as it always did and you wouldn't know the hard drive had been changed.

thanks for the advice!

[dnanian]

Yep - one of the great parts of both OS X and SD. Glad it worked as expected.

[edalzell]

I haven't named the drives the same. Will that cause a problem? I didn't even think of that.

[dnanian]

If you haven't noticed any problems yet, no.

[edalzell]

We'll find out shortly...restored overnight...just about to try it.