Hard drive installation fun!

So my new hard drive and external enclosure arrived today on schedule. I had a fun time getting it going.

The first step was to clone Mac OS X from the laptop to the new drive. I put the new drive into the USB hard drive enclosure (which is intended for the old one after the swap but worked out great for this) and used Disk Utility to do a full filesystem restore from the Macbook Pro's internal hard drive to the external disk.

This took a good three and a half hours! I suspect the slowness of USB disk access is mostly to blame for the long wait. It eventually completed, though, then it was hard drive swapping time.

Apple made changing the disk on the Macbook Pro difficult, but not impossible. I had to:

- Remove about 15 screws around the perimeter of the machine and in the battery compartment,
- *Carefully* lift the keyboard portion of the case up, and undo some snaps holding it down in the front,
- Disconnect the cable from the keyboard to the motherboard,
- Disconnect two very fragile looking cables that are in the way of extracting the old hard drive,
- Remove two screws holding down the disk,
- Lift the disk up precariously and disconnect the SATA/power cable from it (much easier than the old parallel ATA cables at least),
- Replace the components in reverse order, carefully reconnecting all the cables and putting the dozen and a half screws back in.

The result? A perfectly booting Macbook Pro, with about 130GB of free space, along with an external 100GB USB hard drive after I put the old disk in the enclosure. Not to mention the machine *flies* now with the 7200 RPM drive.

Next step will be to resize the disk for boot camp so I can install Windows, then check out Portal, which I've been wanting to try for a few days now but haven't had space on the old disk. Wheee!