At some point, many Mac owners decide their hard drive just isn’t big enough. Too many movies, too much music, a life in photos, and so on. For some, the solution is to add an external hard drive. For iMacs in particular, this is a good option. After all, you’re usually not just picking up the computer and moving it somewhere else. For laptop users, though, this isn’t always a good way to deal with the lack of drive space, especially if you’re using your laptop in fully portable mode (running on batteries and in public locations). In these cases, if it isn’t built-in it’s not as useful. If this sounds like you, then perhaps its time you moved on up to a new, and larger, hard drive.

Some considerations:

As a general rule, power consumption of a hard drive will tend to increase as they get larger in size and have faster rotation speeds. What this means is that if you’re upgrading from a 120GB 4200RPM hard drive to a 500GB 7200RPM model you can expect increased power consumption and, therefore, reduced battery life. (See http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/2.5-hard-drive-charts/Idle-Power-Consumption,681.html)

If you’re considering a move to a solid state drive you will definitely see a performance benefit but almost certainly not an increase in available storage – solid state is still fairly expensive for higher capacity drives. You may also find little benefit in power consumption from using an SSD drive. (See http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-hdd-battery,1955.html)

Be careful which hard drive you choose for your upgrade. There have been reports that some hard drives have compatibility problems in some models of MacBook Pro, including original drives supplied pre-installed by Apple. (See http://www.macnn.com/articles/09/07/09/macbook.pro.defect/)

This tutorial doesn’t really deal with the physical process of pulling your computer apart and replacing the hard drive. There’s far too many Apple models out there for it to be practical to detail how it’s done for each one within this article. For a good how-to on replacing the actual physical hard drive, I’d suggest looking at guides from www.ifixit.com (http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Browse/Mac).

Instead, this tutorial looks at the process of moving your operating system and your data from your old hard drive to the new one. Even here, there are many different ways to achieve the same result. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to move to a new hard drive by making a direct copy of the contents of your current drive to a new one. A subsequent article will look at doing the same thing using a backup to an external hard drive.

I had originally planned to also write about using a TimeMachine backup to do this. While I was documenting the process on my test system I found it didn’t really give my desired result. For starters, it appeared to fail in that it suddenly started reporting a remaining time in the many thousands of hours (three times). While it did eventually finish, further research shows that a Time Machine backup isn’t a full 100% backup of everything on your computer. It skips over stuff that can be recreated or is considered non-essential to a backup (for example, Spotlight indexes aren’t backed up, nor are your email indexes – the email itself is, but not the indexes which will be re-created the first time you run Mail). In terms of what I was aiming to achieve, I consider this less than ideal when there are other methods without these shortcomings.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Time Machine and I wouldn’t be without it on my Macs. As a backup, it’s great to have. In this case, though, the style of backup isn’t a good fit for the result I’m shooting for.

NOTE: This process is going to require you to reboot your computer. You won’t have normal access to it for a while as you work through this. If this is your only computer, print out this tutorial first as you’ll need to refer to it as you work through this process. If you’re doing this on a laptop, plug it into power. Having your battery go flat in the middle of moving an operating system can really make a mess of your day.

Tools needed:

Check www.ifixit.com for details on what you’ll need to actually remove and replace the hard drive.

Other than these requirements, you’ll also need:

• Your Mac OS X Install DVD (or an external bootable hard drive).
• Your new replacement hard drive.
• An external hard drive enclosure that’s compatible with your Mac (USB is the safest, but if your Mac supports Firewire, you can use that and enjoy some extra speed).

The Big Move:

The method used here moves everything on your current internal hard drive to your brand spanking new one. When you’re done, you just swap the drives and you’re pretty much finished. You don’t need to re-install OS X or your applications and go around changing configurations. It’s just like nothing really changed except you’ve got more free space on your hard drive.

Mac OS X, in common with most modern operating systems, locks parts of itself while it’s running. This makes it more difficult to copy everything to another drive because some parts won’t copy. Getting around this requires you to boot from something other than your internal hard drive. In many cases, you can achieve this by booting from your Install DVD but you can also boot from an external hard drive if you’ve set on up to enable this. Either way, what you’re working towards is being able to run Disk Utility but NOT from your normal OS X install on your internal hard drive.

These instructions assume that your Mac is booted normally and working properly.

Option 1 – Boot from your OS X install DVD:

• Insert your Install DVD and wait for the “Mac OS X Install DVD” window to load.

• Double Click on “Install Mac OS X”

• Click on the “Utilities” button

• Click on “Restart”

• Type your account password and hit Enter

• At this point, your Mac will reboot and load OS X from the install DVD

• Click the next button on the language selection

• DO NOT click on “Continue” on the next window that displays

• Instead, go up to the menus at the top of the screen and click on “Utilities” and then select “Disk Utility”

Keep following the instructions after Option 2 – Boot from an external hard drive (skip to there now).

Option 2 – Boot from an external hard drive:

Using this option assumes you’ve already set up an external hard drive to do this. Most external drives won’t do this unless you’ve specifically set them up that way. If you’d like to set one up have a look at this tutorial.

• Plug in your external hard drive and wait for your Mac to recognise it

• Go into System Preferences

• Select “Startup Disk”

• Select your external hard drive

• Click on “Restart”

• Confirm by clicking on “Restart”

• Wait for your Mac to finish booting from the external hard drive

• Start “Disk Utility” (normally found in Applications -> Utilities)

Copy your drive with Disk Utility:

Welcome back to the folks who booted from their Install DVD. No matter which option you used above, the aim was to get you to Disk Utility and you’re here now.

Most of the time, a new hard drive won’t have any partition information on it. Even if it does, it’s unlikely that this will be useful for our purposes. So, first thing is to get your new drive ready to be used.

• Select your new hard drive in Disk Utility (it will be an orange icon indicating it’s an external hard drive)

• Click on “Partition”

• Change the volume scheme to “1 Partition” – you can select other volume schemes if you wish but this is preferred selection.

• Check that format is set as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” (this will usually end up as the default setting).

• Don’t worry about the volume name, this will automagically get changed later.

• Click on “Options” and make sure “GUID Partition Table” is selected. Then click “OK”.

• 

• Click “Apply” to commit all these changes to your hard drive.

• If you get a warning, confirm it. You want to make these changes and there shouldn’t be anything already on this hard drive that you want to keep.

• Depending on how the drive was configured, it can take a little while to finish this step. Once it’s done, you’ll be asked if you want to use the drive for Time Machine. You don’t.

• Now click on “Restore”

• Move your mouse over your internal hard drive (usually, this is going to be the one that’s a silvery grey colour and has the name “Macintosh HD”).

• Click and hold your left mouse button, drag the mouse over the text box beside “Source:” then release the mouse button. (1)

• If you did this right, the “Source:” box will now have “Macintosh HD” in it.

• Move your mouse over your freshly prepared hard drive (it’ll probably be called “Untitled 1” or some such)

• Click and hold your left mouse button, drag the mouse over the text box beside “Destination:” then release the mouse button. (2)

• If you did this right, the “Destination:” box will now have “Untitled 1” in it.

• Make sure the “Erase destination” button is ticked. (3)

• Now click on “Restore” (4)

• Confirm by clicking on “Erase” and enter your password to get it all started.

• You’ll now see the progress bar near the lower right of the Disk Utility window indicate what it’s doing and how long you’ll be waiting for it to finish.

• When it finishes, it might ask if you want to use the drive for Time Machine – you don’t.

Assuming everything went right, you now have a new hard drive with an exact copy of everything that was on your old hard drive. The new drive will work as a boot drive (in fact, if you set it as the system disk it will boot even while in it’s external enclosure).

At this point, you’re done with the software part of this and you’re ready for the hardware bit – that’s the part where you shut down your Mac, pull things apart and remove your old hard drive and then install the new one. As noted above, check out the guides on ifixit.com for more information on that. If this all works, you’re now ready for the last little bit of configuration.

Set the System Disk:

Your Mac should be turned off at this point. Feel free to disconnect any remaining external hard drives, don’t worry if your Install DVD is still in the drive, we’ll take care of that soon.

• Power up your Mac and hold down the Option key on your keyboard.

• You’ll get a grey screen with pictures of each bootable disk available on the system. The drive that’s currently set as your system drive will have an up arrow under it.

• Select your internal hard drive (it’ll be the one that isn’t orange in colour) and then click on the up arrow (that should now have moved to the drive you just selected).

• Your Mac should now boot normally from your freshly installed, roomier new hard drive.

• Once booted, you can eject your Install DVD if it’s still in the drive.

There you have it. As a follow-up to this tutorial, I’ll add another one using an external hard drive for when you don’t have a spare hard drive enclosure to use.

David Freeman is the proprietor of Outback Queensland Internet (aka Leading Edge Computers Longreach). While a recent returnee to the world of Apple he has worked as a technician for over fifteen years and been involved in computers and the Internet since 1988 when he purchased his first computer (an Amiga 1000).