Enough is enough. I’ve delayed upgrading this modest 80 gig hard drive that came with the Macbook for far too long. It’s time for an upgrade! So down I go to the local dodgey computer store, you know the one that looks more like a warehouse than a shop. I picked up a 160 gig drive for $125. Bargain! 5400rpm, 8Mb cache, NCQ. Certainly not the fastest but well worth the price.
Now i’ve been doing Time Machine backups since November last year, so when I got home, I fired up the computer one last time and performed a backup. After it was done, I proceeded shut down the system and removed the battery then the hard drive. Goodbye ol faithful. In went the new drive and back went the battery.
Upon firing up the machine with the external hard drive connected, I stuck in the Leopard install DVD and went through the menus to partition the drive, and then perform a system restore from backup. It asked for the source and then the destination. It then proceeded to restore my files. Everything looked good so far so I walked away and timed the process.
It took about an hour to complete and once finished, asked me to restart the system which I did.
When the system booted back up, you could imagine my astonishment to find everything exactly the way I had left it before the hard drive swap! Everything! From the placement of the icons on my desktop, to the applications I had installed. With the exception that I now had much more space 🙂
This has got to be one of the most painless hard drive upgrades I have ever done. Nice one Apple for making this such a painless process!