I have a 2.4Ghz Macbook Pro (2007) with a 160GB internal drive. However, I only had 2GB free disk space left. My Aperture library with my 7495 photos was taking 80GB of the 160GB. And I knew I would be bringing back another 20GB of photos from London this July. ITunes took another 20GB.
So, to treat myself after a depressing week of rumors at work, I bought a new 320GB internal drive. I planned out the replacement carefully, gathering all my passwords and serial numbers so that I could quickly build up the system from scratch.
There were only two hitches. The first was that I never got around to buying any Torx screwdrivers. In the past, I was able to get around this limitation with a flathead screwdriver that would fix in the star pattern. However, once I had the laptop open, the final two screws would not come out using this method. I was in my office at work, and it was after 7:30pm on a Friday. I ran down to all of the labs in the building to see if anyone was still around, or if there were any obvious open toolboxes where I could borrow a Torx T-6. It took my 30 minutes before I found one soul still in the lab working late, and he loaned me his Torx T-6. I completed the replacement (and put the old drive in an external USB enclosure) and closed up the computer.
Next was to reinstall MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard), and then all of the software. Everything went smoothly until I hit the second problem when installing Adobe Photoshop CS3 (which was one of the last applications to install). I found out that Photoshop CS3 does not support the MacOSX Extended case-sensitive filesystem, which was the format I choose at the very start of the MacOSX installation. I still can’t believe that the CS3 installer chokes on a case-sensitive filesystem – in 2009? Good Grief!
So Saturday morning, I had to start from scratch again by re-formating the drive, installing MacOSX, all of the applications, patch everything, put in the serial numbers and finally copy over some of my old preferences and email databases.
I was finished Saturday night. I also bought a set of Torx screwdrivers at Canadian Tire. Aside from the two snags, the replacement went very smoothly.