Upgrade Your Apple MacBook: Data Backup and Preservation.

Step 3 Test And Repair Drive Virginity

Your new hard drive is a clean product just purchased from whatever retailer you've chosen. It's as pure and blank as freshly fallen snow, right? I'm sorry to disappoint you, but you can't take that for granted. As innocent as it looks, it may have its dark side.

What you need to do is completely Zero your drive, which will completely erase everything on it and find the locations that may be damaged and demarcate them as such.

You should first plug in the new hard drive enclosure with the new disk in it . Now you should open the Disk Utility. You can find it in Applications/Utilities/Disk Utility. You should see the new hard drive icon up on the right.

• Click on it and then select the Erase tab.
• Click the Security Options button
• Select Zero Out Data and click OK
• Now press Erase

This process will take a while. Go make some coffee.

Comments

[funnelhead]

There is no need whatever to zero the data - but what you DO have to do is repartition the disk. This is because if the disk has the wrong partition type, your Mac will not be able to boot from it. You can repartition as a single partition; that will erase the disk and ensure bootability, and it only takes a second or two. Assuming that this MacBook is Intel-based, you need to ensure that it is partitioned using GUID. See http://db.tidbits.com/article/8405 for more info.

[nsanjana]

GUID is vital since the Instructable also does a Leopard upgrade at the end. I did the whole thing (hours of work!!) just to have it fail at the end since the drive was not partitioned correctly. GUID is necessary for Leopard to install.

It is ridiculous that this guy mentions zero'ing the HD (a process that took 6+ hours on my 500gb drive), which is totally unnecessary, and yet omits the REQUIRED step of selecting GUID.

This instructable should be fixed or better yet, see this web page, which is far better:
http://obscuredclarity.blogspot.com/2008/10/500gb-macbook-harddrive-upgrade-for.htmlhttp://obscuredclarity.blogspot.com/2008/10/500gb-macbook-harddrive-upgrade-for.html

[tastewar]

Indeed! Partition type is key. I had done a very similar project on my Intel iMac: bought a new disk, put it in an external enclosure, formatted the disk, backed up the current HD to the new one (I used Carbon Copy Cloner), then attempted to boot from it and it wouldn't. Had to re-partition to get the right partition type (not something you can change after the fact!) and run the backup all over again. Then everything was fine, though getting to the HD in a 20" iMac was a challenge. You might want to amend the instructions to mention partition type.

[larwe]

This method of doing things is a bit rigmarolish and not SOP. The easiest way to achieve exactly the same net effect is: 1. Place the new blank drive in your MacBook. 2. Place your old hard disk in the SATA enclosure. Don't connect it to the computer yet. 3. Install OS on MacBook. 4. Plug in the SATA drive and copy across anything you need from your old hard drive.

[The Eck]

How about after you install the OS on the new internal drive you use the Migration Assistant to copy everything you want from the old drive (that is now in an enclosure). Be sure it's hooked up via firewire. It ought to show up as a "partition" or other volume, but not as another Mac.

[lamedust]

That surely would work if you wanted a back up. But you would have to individually copy everything while not copying any of the operating system. This way all your programs and files are there and your computer seems the same, but larger. -bg