Upgrade Mac pwerbook harddrive

[karoline]

I have the first 17" Mac powerbook (1GHZ processor) that came out and wish to upgrade the hard drive. From what I can see the western Digital 250g Scorpio WD2500BEVE hard drive will be compatible and is available from Scan computers but they don't promise that it will work on a MAC as they sell for PC's. Can anyone confirm that I will be ordering the correct part?

[peterb]

Welcome to Hexus...

Physically the drive should fit - the Macbook uses pretty standard PC hardware. You need to check the dimensions of the new and old drive though to be certain. While 2.5" drives are that size, the thickness can vary.

As for the software side....

However you will need to re-install the operating system onto the drive - presumably you will have an install disk for that. It is then a matter of transferring the data from the old drive to the new. One way would be to back up your personal fils to a USB drive and then copy them back again.

There is another way - but it isn't something I have tried on a MAC and not guranteed to work.

You could clone the existing MAC hard drive to the new drive. This would mean that the new drive (or at least the first bit) is an exact bit by bit copy of the old drive, and should therefore boot without problems, with your operating environment intact. You would then have to find some way of either extending the partition to use up all of the new disk's space, or create a new partition in the unallocated space. This gets slightly more complicated as Macs use a different method of partitioning from Windows (a GUID Partition Table or GPT)

You will need a MAC os partition manager - Google may help.

The next problem is how to clone the disk. If I was doing it, I would use a Linux live CD (or a Linux Computer) and use the Linux dd command. However there may be MAC OS tools that will do that for you. Again Google will be your friend.

This link may also help

http://www.macworld.com/article/4538...uperduper.html

I am conscious that I might have prompted more questions than giving answers! I am not a MAC expert, and while What you are proposing is possible, it isn't something I have done on a Mac, so I am reluctant (unable!) to give you a definite 'How to' - others might be able to, but I hope I have suggested enough for you to investigate further.

At worst, if you do buy the disk you su=ggest, you could mount it in a USB enclosure, and use it as external or backup storage for the Mac.