In these media-rich days where we’re all storing our music, photos, movies, TV shows and more on our computer there just never seems to be enough hard drive space. Once, having a hard drive at all was an expensive luxury but now it’s a necessity and, often, today’s standard options just aren’t enough. Sooner or later, you reach a point where you don’t want to have to delete some stuff off your computer just to fit the latest album by your favourite band into iTunes.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 you get larger capacity and 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. For this process, I’d suggest looking at guides from www.ifixit.com (http://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Browse/Mac).
In a previous tutorial I looked at moving your operating system to a new drive in an external enclosure. This is a great, and fairly simple, way to move into a roomier home without doubling up on moving data around. However, it’s not your only option. If you don’t have an external drive enclosure but you’ve got access to an external hard drive then here’s a method that’ll work for you.
Originally, I planned to also write a tutorial on how to do this using a Time Machine backup. For reasons discussed in my earlier tutorial on this topic, I decided it wasn’t really an appropriate method for this process. That doesn’t make Time Machine a bad thing, it’s far from it. Just that it’s not the ideal tool for this particular job.
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 (it could even be the one you boot from if it’s been set up that way) with enough free space to back up your internal hard drive
Preparation:
In broad terms, what we’re going to do is create an image backup of your internal hard drive, then replace your internal hard drive with the new, larger, one and then restore from image backup to your new drive.
So, the first step is to create your image backup. Creating an image backup of a hard drive is far easier when it’s not the drive you booted from. So, the first thing we need to do is get your Mac booted from something other than your internal hard drive. If you’ve chosen to use your install DVD, you’re up first. Those who are using an external bootable hard drive, just skip over the Install DVD bit.
This tutorial assumes your Mac is booted normally and ready to be used.
Option 1 - Boot from your OS X install DVD:
If you're using an external hard drive instead, you can skip over this section.
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 (select other than english if that’s appropriate for you)
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 (click here to skip over).
(If you're back here from further on in this article, click here to return where you left off.)
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 the instruction in 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)
Image 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.
Click on your internal hard drive (usually the silvery grey colour and often has the name “Macintosh HD”)
Now click on “New Image”
Select your external hard drive as the location to save your disk image
Give your disk image a name
Click on “Save” - Disk Utility will now start creating your new disk image.
This can take quite a while if you have a fairly large and full hard drive. Go away and have a cup of coffee while you wait.
When it finishes, the progress window closes but there’s no buttons to click. When the progress window is gone, you’re done.
The Big Change:
Now that you’ve got your image backup on your external hard drive, you can shut down your Mac and do the physical hard drive swap. Refer to the great guides at ifixit.com for how to do this.
Once you’ve done that, we’re ready to get all your stuff restored back on your new, roomier, hard drive. To do this, you’re going to have to re-visit Disk Utility from your chosen boot disk (be it the Install DVD or an external hard drive).
Bring Back my Data:
If you’re using the install DVD option, power up your computer and hold down the “c” key to boot it from the DVD. Once the system boots up follow the steps listed here from the Option 1 procedure above to the point where you have Disk Utility loaded and come back here.
If you’re using an external hard drive option, do this:
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 external hard drive (it’ll most likely be orange in colour) and then click on the up arrow (that should now have moved to the drive you just selected).
Once your Mac is booted from the external hard drive, run Disk Utility (usually found in Applications -> Utilities).
For either option, you should now be at the point where you have Disk Utility running from your install DVD or external hard drive. Now it’s time to put your data back.
Go up to the Select menu and click on “Scan Image for Restore”
Select the disk image you created above and click on “Scan”
Enter your password to allow the process to start
Go have a cup of coffee, if you’ve backed up a lot of data this might take a while.
Coffee all done? Good. There should also be a requester on your screen telling you the scan is complete.
Select your new hard drive in Disk Utility (it will most likely be the silvery grey one)
Click on “Partition”
Change the volume scheme to “1 Partition” - you can select other volume schemes if you wish but this is my recommendation.
Set the format as “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)”.
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, in this case, will probably have the name “Untitled 1”).
Click and hold your left mouse button, drag the mouse over the text box beside “Destination:” then release the mouse button.
If you did this right, the “Destination:” box will now have “Untitled 1” in it.
Now click the “Image” button near “Source:”
Select the drive image you created earlier (and just scanned for restore at step 4 of this section) and click “Open” to load it.
If you did this right, the “Source:” box will now have the name of your DMG file in it.
Make sure the “Erase destination” box is ticked.
Click on “Restore” and then click “Erase” on the next requester.
Enter your password to start the process going.
Now it’s coffee time again.
Coffee done? How ‘bout that restore? OK, we’ll wait a little longer...
There’s no message to tell you it’s done, when there’s no activity in Disk Utility it’s done.
Assuming it all went right, your new hard drive (which you’ve already installed in your Mac) is all restored back just the way it was last time you booted it normally. All except, that is, that it now has more free space on it. We’re on the home straight, one last configuration bit and we’re done.
Set the System Disk:
The last thing we need to do is to tell your Mac which system disk to boot from. Either way, we’re done with Disk Utility so you can quit out of it now.
If you’re booted from the Install DVD, go up to the Utilities Menu and select “Startup Disk...”.
If you’re booted from an external hard drive, go into system preferences and select “Startup Disk”.
From there, select your newly upgraded hard drive (it should be the silvery grey one, don’t pick the orange looking one) and then click on restart and then restart again to confirm.
That’s it, you’re done!
Your Mac should now be happily booting off it’s newly installed and roomier home but with everything looking just like it used to except with more free space.
Which Method?
Personally, I prefer to use the method that uses an external drive enclosure. It’s much less stuffing around. However, either will do the job.
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).
Tutorial: Upgrade your Mac Hard Drive (Method 2 - Backup to External)