MacBook Pro Hard Drive Replacement

I upgraded the hard drive in my MacBook Pro today. It went pretty well, but is not really for the easily technological-intimidated! I followed (for the most part) the guide at ifixit. I ran into a few things that their guide didn’t include, so I thought I would add my experience here. First, as you remove the screws, make a list of the location of the screws, and how many you removed. Be sure that you place each set in their own location. The guide doesn’t state that there are different lengths of screws.

Second, after you have all the screws removed, it will help to use your head: literally! When you lift the top panel (with the keyboard and trackpad) the cable isn’t long enough to let you stand the panel up by itself. I just stuck my head in and let it rest on it while I unplugged the cable (you have to remove a short piece of tape first).

Third, when it comes time to remove the hard drive cable, you will have to pry it off a couple of locations where they tacked it with some glue. I used a business card to slide under the cable to loosen the glue. Don’t use anything metal and don’t bend the cable. It is very fragile and could break a connection very easily.

Last, I didn’t reinstall the top panel screws at all before checking to make sure the hard drive was working. I just snapped the panel back in place and booted of my Leopard dvd-rom. You will have to use Disk Utility once you have booted to format the drive. After the format, you are ready to proceed with the install.

For my data, I already had a Western Digital 250gb Passport drive, so I backed up most everything there, just to be safe. I stopped by the local computer shop and picked up a 2.5 inch SATA to USB hard drive enclosure and just transferred my old laptop drive to there. After OS X was installed, I just plugged this in and copied everything I needed over. Now I have a clean install, and all my data was backed up in two locations!

Side note: After the OS X install, I noticed the laptop really heating up, which worried me. Once the system was installed, I ran Software Update and installed all the latest patches. Now, the heat is back to normal.

~ by Sumo on May 24, 2008.