Zano

Well, after a few years of use, my MacBook Pro’s 80gig hard drive was just not cutting it anymore. With the launch of Leopard it’s now a very easy thing to backup / recover your entire system so that was the catalyst to get this job done. First up was ordering the drive. I picked out a Hitachi 250 gigabyte sata drive for the upgrade. Next was to backup the existing drive using Time Machine.

Next you crack the case open and extract the old hard drive. The easiest way to go about that is to use the excellent guides at ifixit.com which will guide you step by step all the way from opening up the system to installing the new hardware.

Once you have all the hardware part done, you can move on to the initial install. You simply install a new fresh copy of Leopard on the new drive to get started. Then when the base install is finished you are asked if you would like to do a restore from your Time Machine backup. You get to choose what to restore (select everything, including the users) and you are good to go.

Only a very few things don’t come over with the restore. Things like the system patches and updates from Apple have to be re-installed after you are all done and back up. Overall this was an easy upgrade and the extra space is WELCOME!