Steve Maller Photography

OK, I’m not just a photographer. Those of you who know me know that I was a software engineer for almost 20 years before I re-invented myself as a photographer. And my geek heritage still lurks just beneath the surface.With that as a background, I’ll share an experience I had yesterday. I have a Macbook Pro. I love this computer. It’s wicked fast, totally portable, and very sleek and attractive. All things that I am not. Ha ha. Anyway, I bought it a year ago, and now that the warranty’s expired, I decided to upgrade its original 5400rpm 120gb hard drive to a larger, faster 7200rpm 200gb hard drive. Here is my story…

I recently performed a hard drive upgrade on my son’s Macbook (which was still on Tiger) and I had to use Carbon Copy Cloner. But I read that OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) Time Machine was a better, smarter way to do this, so I decided to try it.

I have not used Time Machine yet. I use a set of rsync scripts I wrote for backup of my Macs and didn’t think Time Machine was necessary. But I decided to take the plunge.I connected a 250gb Firewire drive to my Macbook Pro and started Time Machine. I set it to look at the Firewire drive, and within a moment or two it started the backup. I let the machine sit for several hours, and it finally finished about 3 1/2 hours later (the Macbook Pro’s 120gb disk was about 98% full).

I then followed the best of several disassembly guides I found on the web and successfully completed the installation of the new drive into the Macbook Pro.I connected the Firewire drive back to the Macbook Pro, put in my Leopard upgrade disk, and booted the Mac. And here are a few comments about how it went from there:

1) It was unclear as to whether the Leopard Time Machine restore program would recognize the new HD before I formatted it. It didn’t seem to, so I switched to Disk Utility and formatted it, naming it the same as the old drive. It still didn’t recognize the disk. So I rebooted and the second time I started up it recognized the HD.

2) The restore process was uneventful. It took about two hours.

3) When I restarted with the new HD, the Macbook Pro took a very long time to boot. Not surprising. I figure it cleaned all the OS caches and had to rebuild them all.

4) When I finally got to the desktop, I was pleased that it seemed everything was there where I left it.

5) I started Mail.app, and was greeted with a window that said I should import my mailboxes. I was confused, so I quit and thought maybe the Mac was not finished rebuilding things. When I started Mail later, it started up and got my new messages. But I noticed that none of my old mail was there. So I realized that while Mail.app remembered my mailboxes, my filters and the rest of my account info, it failed to recognize any of my old mail. So I had to painstakingly re-import all my old messages (nearly 100,000) into the mailboxes (30+). That was a pain. At least it worked, though.

6) Then Apple’s Aperture failed to start, saying in the resulting crash log that certain OS frameworks were not present. Weird. The /Library/Frameworks folder seemed like it was only 1/2 restored. So I found the Frameworks folder from my Mac Pro (running the same OS), zipped them up and transfered them over. I unzipped them, carefully set the permissions to be the same as the other ones, and was able to re-open Aperture.

7) The Spotlight database seems to be out of whack, so I rebuilt it. I couldn’t seem to find much of anything. Now it works.

All in all, I would deem this process a success, but it’s not for the faint of heart. And if I was not conversant in Unix and the Mac’s internals, I’m afraid it might not have ended well.