Mac Hard Drive Replacement Advice?
September 11th, 2008 -- by Augie De Blieck Jr.
Here’s what I want to do:
I have a Mac tower from 2004. (Yup, it’s not even Intel chipped.) It has two hard drive bays. The first has the 80GB hard drive the machine came with. The second has a 250GB model I added in later.
The machine boots off that 80GB drive and has all the OS stuff on it.
I want to replace that 80GB drive with a 1 Terabyte drive. It would be easier replacing the 250GB drive — just slide it out, put the new one in, hook up the old one externally and copy all the files.
It’s a little more difficult doing this to your boot drive. Has anyone done this before? Do you have any recommendations for sites that explain this process? How easy is it?
Thanks in advance for the advice.
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September 11th, 2008 at 8:32 am
I think you could use a clone util like super duper to do what your thinking of. Moving that 80GB OS partition to a new 1TB drive. I’ve not done it myself.
In these situations I’ve always this senario as an excuse to reload the OS and all of the apps. I’ve always ended up finding dozens of apps I’ve downloaded and never used.
If the 1TB drive is just for storage, then its much simpler to swap it with the 250 drive. Don’t mess with the close or the OS reload if you don’t have to. Additionally you could further use an external enclosure to just add the storage.
Be careful though that the 4 year old tower has SATA ports. I don’t know of any IDE 1TB drives and I don’t remember the 04 vintage of Mac to know if they used SATA or not. Apple’s web site would have that information I suspect or even macsales.com.
good luck.
September 11th, 2008 at 9:41 pm
Thanks, Erich. I might just do that and swap the 250 out for the 1 Tera, and then make the 250 an external drive. I already have an external 500GB drive that I use as backup, but maybe it’s time to give it some company.
Wish I could afford a Drobo, though. . .
I also like the idea of wiping the smaller drive clean and restarting, but I just know I’ll have lost some key serial number for something I count on, and then hate myself forever and ever.
There’s food for thought there, though. So thanks.