This past weekend I took on a new project, or really two projects – upgrading the RAM and hard drive in my 17” Macbook Pro, then taking the “old” hard drive and putting it into a 13” Macbook belonging to my other half. After researching a lot of information online (I love Google searches), I made some decisions about how to proceed with the updates, gathered the pieces, and started into the process.

The Macbook Pro, had 2GB RAM, and I wanted to take it to the maximum of 3GB (the newest ones can even go to 4GB). The hard drive was the largest I could get at the time, a 160GB, but now I want to boost that to a new 320GB drive.

The Macbook was already at the maximum RAM of 2GB, but it’s hard drive was only 120GB, so the old MB Pro drive, at 160GB, is a smaller upgrade, but still useful for the aging Macbook.

So last week I ordered the pieces I would need: a 320GB Toshiba HD, matched RAM (a 2GB module and a 1GB module), and a little $30 gadget from Newer Technology that allows you to take any internal IDE, ATA, or SATA drive and pretend it is a USB 2.0 drive (Joel McLaughlin will be doing a review of it soon!).

Also in the gathering process were the “soft” tools I would need: instructions for taking apart the Macbook and Macbook Pro and replacing the desired components, and software to manage the backups. The instructions came from ifixit.com, an invaluable resource for Macintosh tear down and repair information. For the backup software, I chose to use Carbon Copy Cloner, version 3.0.1 from Bombich Software. It doesn’t directly handle the Bootcamp partition I am running, but I’ll get to that in a moment. For the moment, let me comment that, if you find shareware that is useful to you, I highly recommend that you consider donating something to them. Writing good software takes time and energy and, if you find a piece of software useful, I believe it’s really important to show your support for the effort!

For handling my Bootcamp partition, I had a couple of possible choices. I could implement VMWare Fusion or Parallels, which would turn my Bootcamp drive into a virtual machine and simply move the machine, or I could find a way to migrate and stay in Bootcamp. I found some reasonable instructions for keeping Bootcamp and I chose to follow those.

Also – I gathered up my disks for Windows XP Home and Macintosh OSX Leopard (10.5) and I got out a couple of small screwdriver sets I have – one for Phillips/flathead, and one for Torx.

With all of this stuff in place, I started on the process. First I took out the battery, undid a few screws (as instructed in the MB Pro hard drive replacement guide from ifixit) and I was able to quickly remove the current RAM and put in the new 3GB of RAM. I thought the additional RAM might help the copy process go a little faster and smoother. The RAM went in flawlessly, the only gotcha being that the clips holding in the RAM are a little hard to pop open. I’m not sure if slot order matters, but I put the 2GB chip into slot 0, and the 1GB chip into slot 1. Not sure if you got it in the order you want? The computer runs either way, but you can check when the computer is on by running the System Profiler software (APPLE –> ABOUT THIS MAC –>MORE INFO, then choosing the MEMORY option. It will tell you how much RAM and what slot the chips are in.

With the new memory working so easily and well I moved on and took the new drive, hooked it up to the MB Pro with the drive adapter, and proceeded to “clone” my HD to the new drive. For me, that was about a 2 hour or so process. My drive had about 140GB of data on it, so it was pretty full. I haven’t addressed my Bootcamp partition yet, but, as I said, we’ll get to that in a bit.

Now comes the fun part. Following the ifixit instructions, I tore down the Macbook Pro to the point where I could reach the hard drive. I will point out that you need to be gentle, especially when pulling off the upper panel/keyboard. The connector comes off very easily (remember to check this when putting it back together, too!). The good news it that I didn’t have to go down into too many layers to get to the hard drive, and it came out pretty easily. I was also pretty pleasantly surprised by the screws, near the outer edge of the case that were set in at an angle to make it easier to get the screwdriver in to them. Nice touch, Apple!

So I put the new drive in, close everything up, and repower it – moment of truth – it all works! Yay!

I will mention that Apple uses a LARGE number of screws. I don’t know if it’s a testament to build quality or if it’s the work of a sadist – like that one relative you have that always insists on putting on way too many layers of tape when wrapping presents, but either way, be prepared to spend a lot of time working with screws. I’d suggest finding some way to set them aside with labels to in some kind or order or something that will help you remember what screws go back where – because you WILL get confused at some point!

Okay – so now it was time to deal with the Bootcamp partition. I started by taking my old drive and hooking it up using that nifty USB drive connection . So now I can see the old drive and the new drive again. A Google search lead me to a number of places that talked about migrating the Bootcamp partition, so I’m not sure who to credit for the information I’m about to summarize here, but the best overall description I found for the process is at macosxhints. The process is simply this: Start up the Bootcamp Assistant, partition the drive as you’d like (my Windows partition is 32GB), and start the Windows installation process. For this you need a genuine Windows disk. During the installation, you pick the partition you just created. You need to tell it to go ahead and format it as FAT (it will pick FAT32 because if it’s size) and it will copy some support file to the partition. Once it reaches the point of rebooting, you will interrupt the process by holding down the OPTION key, which should bring you to screen where you select which drive to boot from. Select your Macintosh HD and boot back into OS X.

With OSX back up and running, I opened the OLD Bootcamp partition (which was attached as an external drive now) and then opened the NEW Bootcamp partition (now on internal disk drive). On the NEW drive, I deleted all the files put there by the partial WIndows XP install, throwing them into the trash and emptying the trash. The instructions say to copy ntldr, NTDETECT.COM, boot.ini, and PAGEFILE.SYS, but I didn’t have a PAGEFILE.SYS file to copy so I skipped that file without any problem, but if you have it and are trying this, you should probably copy it.

Once those 4 files are in place, I simply dragged the rest of the file/folders over from the old partition to the new one. The trick is to make sure you don’t overwrite those original 4 though!

As a last step I needed to specify which drive, Macintosh or Windows, should be used as primary boot for the laptop. This can be set in the Control/System panels from either tha Mac or the Windows side, doesn’t matter – works either way!

And here’s where I ran into my one and only glitch. For some reason, my Windows XP system started and ran fine, but on startup it opened a desktop.ini file (one of the many desktop.ini files on a Windows computer) with some commands in it that seem to have not completed. I’m not sure why this started doing this when it didn’t do it in the previous implementation, but desktop.ini files are usually customizations of your window settings, or settings for a particular window. The trick is to figure out which one is running and get it to stop! This particular file was in the Startup folder for my username (rather than the one for all users). I moved the file out of the startup folder (since I haven’t really customized anything) and restarted and, so far, all is running well!

So at this point it I took a break. The following morning, I started working on the 13” Macbook. Once again, I used the Newer Technolgy device and again attached the old MBPro drive. I used the Disk Utility to format it up first (as Mac OS Extended – journaled). Then I ran Carbon Copy Cloner again (which I downloaded onto the Macbook, this time) and copied the internal HD to the new/old MB Pro drive. This time I didn’t have to worry about a Bootcamp partition, so I just needed to wait the 2+ hours for the backup to complete. Once the backup finished, I detached it all, referred back to the handy dandy ifixit instructions. I took out the battery, removed the memory cover, and pulled on the little tab to pull out the MB hard drive. The only thing left was to unscrew the tray attached to the drive. I put the tray onto the new drive, slid it back in, restored the memory cover, put the battery back in and rebooted.

It worked! Yay, again!

The process was amazingly simple and took my less than 24 hours to complete (outside of ordering the parts). It takes a little time, care and patience, but, it’s amazing what you can find with a few Google searches!