Macbook surgery
iaian7 » blog John Einselen, 1.06.08Last week my macbook died. It was happily playing an iTunes playlist, then started randomly pausing. Then freezing. Then nothing, save for the clicking noises emanating from the hard drive compartment.
TimeMachine had backed up my files early that morning, so nothing was actually lost (save for application installations, which in my short sighted wisdom, I removed from the backup list to save space!). I think I’ve learned a little after losing 2-5 years of my life just a month or two ago in a freak hard drive format. Backing up is very, very important. TimeMachine makes it easy. If you have a mac running Leopard, use it! (Though beware the caveats below)
Since the hard drive clearly had to be replaced, it was finally the perfect chance to upgrade! I would have liked to go for a nice 7200.2 Seagate drive, but found a slower, larger (and perhaps more battery efficient) Western Digital on sale. My frugal scottish genes were happy.
Drive installation, unlike Macbook Pros, is really rather wonderful. I took out the battery, detached the internal compartment guard strip, slid out the old hard drive, attached the new drive to the sliding tab mechanism, slid it back in, closed everything up, and was done. The entire process took less than 15 minutes, though it certainly helped that I had a hex bit handy, and a decent set of miniature screw drivers.
Then came the challenge – when installing Leopard, you can easily restore users off an old mac, an external hard drive, or a TimeMachine backup. However, I’d stored my time machine backups on the second internal hard drive in my G5. Which is inaccessible via network during the Leopard installation. Booting the G5 into FireWire disk mode only helped a little – the macbook backups were somehow stored in a compressed volume, and only the G5 backups were visible to the Leopard installer!
The process was circuitous (and ended up involving the Migration Assistant and multiple user accounts), so I won’t bore you with the details, save for these suggestions: back up to an external drive, and if you can, use a different drive for each computer. It could simplify the process greatly.
Now that the painless hardware upgrade and painful software install is over, everything is finally happy again. All my documents, music, videos, emails, settings, and preferences are restored, and the Macbook is humming away happily with well over 3 times the hard drive space (Vista should be happier too, I doubled it’s partition size!). While it’s not a particularly speedy drive, it should suffice till its own untimely demise, and I can upgrade to something better suited for photo editing and video work. Perhaps by then the solid state drives announced last week will be cheap enough for a mere mortal to afford.
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Just can’t catch a break, what with the server implosion and hard drive failures, can you?
I feel your pain in any case, but I’m glad to hear you had everything backed up.
Also, hello short hair buddy!