The hard drive on my early 2009 17″ MacBook Pro has been giving me hints for months that it was going to fail. The cost of a replacement drive and the fact that the swap is a DIY job meant that it just wasn’t worth waiting for the drive to crap out. Doing the swap now would mean doing so on my own terms when I was ready for it and well prepared.
First, I had to find a new drive. I did some (a lot) of research and found a WD Blue 500 GB Mobile Hard Drive that was well reviewed, suitable for a MacBook Pro, and available cheaper on Amazon than anywhere else, including Newegg.
The physical job of swapping the drive was very easy. I used a YouTube video to show me how to do it. Since I watched this before buying the drive, I knew to add a T6 Torx screwdriver to my order.
What troubled me was how, exactly, to get my new hard drive up and running. All my research was telling me that the new hard drive would magically boot up and I would be able to restore my system from my last Time Machine backup. That didn’t sit right with me and I dug deeper.
As it turns out, that above info is fine for folks who have newer Macs with internet recovery, as well as access to an open wifi signal or hard wired internet. This was not my case with an early 2009 Macbook Pro. What I had to do was create a recovery disk on one of my external hard drives.
I partitioned my 2TB drive and used the recovery assistant app to create a recovery disk on the partition, which took just a few minutes. That combined with a fresh Time Machine backup meant that I was ready to do the surgery.
One of the mounting bar screws was so tight that I stripped it and had to remove it with needle nose pliers. Otherwise, swapping the hard drives was just as easy as the video claimed.
The new hard drive installed, I turned on the computer, holding down the Option key after the chime. This allowed me to choose a drive for booting, and I selected my new recovery disk.
The recovery disk allowed Disk Utility to open. This made it possible to select the new drive and format it it correctly. I was then able to mount it.
The final step was to to restore my system by choosing my last Time Machine backup and having it restored on my newly formatted hard drive. This took about two hours.
And that’s it! I restarted the computer once the restoration was done and it’s almost like I never did the surgery. I am finding the new hard drive to be a lot louder, but this is something I was warned about in the reviews, so I’ll learn to put up with it.
I also gained 180GB of hard drive space since I went from a 320GB drive to a 500GB drive. Combine that with my external drives and I have 4TB of hard drive space available to me. I won’t be running out of space anytime soon!
Just skimmed the video for yours because I just did this for my Macbook a couple of months ago and wouldn’t have called the process easy. Mine is about a year older than yours. That appears to have made all the difference. About twice as many screws and multiple ribbon cables to remove. I’ve had bad experiences with other electronics trying to remove those little cables so I always have a case of nerves when I know they’re coming. So maybe it just felt worse!
FWIW, I used “Super Duper” to make an exact copy of my old drive, so that part was easy peasy. Once I swapped drives and booted up, it was like nothing had changed.
For the early 2009 MBP, it really was easy. If the dang mount bar screw hadn’t been so tight, the job would have taken at most 5 minutes. It was easier than adding the RAM.
I also use SuperDuper to make a bootable backup, but I prefer to restore from Time Machine. No reason, it’s just what I’m used to. I consider the SuperDuper backup to be insurance. If my Mac suddenly crapped out, I could go grab the cheapest used Mac I can find, plug the HD into it, and be up and running again. I don’t think the Time Machine backup can be used on a different computer.
I hear you on going with what you feel comfortable with!
There is an issue with using Time machine on another Mac. The logic board in mine was replaced under warranty. As far as Time machine was concerned, it was a different machine because the logic board was. I can’t remember how I did it but I did find some way to work around that and restored from it. Found online somewhere…
Funny on mine, it’s the ram that’s easy. Three screws!
I figure that with regular Time Machine and Super Duper backups, I can handle any crisis.
The RAM wasn’t difficult to get to, just fussy. I don’t have much dexterity and I had a hard time getting it to snap into place. I didn’t have any trouble handling the hard drives at all.
Was this posting written by the same woman that had trepidations about removing the battery from her Ford pickup?
No, from her Ford motorhome! 😀 Thank you for this comment! LOL I am silly aren’t I?