Gorillapond Dot Com

I just put a 160GB drive in my MacBook (pictured in the site header), what a hassle it was! I had to run to the hardware store to get the proper torx tool (T-8 in case you’re wondering).

First, I had issues creating an image (.DMG) of the 80GB drive. First I tried to create a image of the disk itself (disk0), not the volume (disk0s2). The resulting image wouldn’t mount. Not sure if it was just corrupted or if some other problem happened. I had problems formatting the external drive through the USB interface, the Firewire interface worked great.

What actually worked for me:

1. Install OS X to my external HD (using Firewire!) using the least install options possible. I had to reformat the volume for no reason to let OS X install to it, no idea why.
2. Update to newest OS X updates (They make changes/patches to Disk Utility that might help your imaging) to the external drive
3. Run disk utility
4. Create DMG of your VOLUME. It will look like “disk0s2,” not just “disk0.” Click File, New, Disk Image from disk0s2 (Yours may be different. So long as you click the correct volume in the left column of disk utility before going into this menu, it will show the correct volume).
5. I’d use read/write format, but it’s up to you. Compressed seemed to be CPU limited and took longer.
6. Start the process. I used Activity Monitor, disk activity tab to look at the transfer rate.
7. Shutdown MacBook, install new disk.
8. Boot up on external drive again
9. Find your disk image, mount it.
10. Partition new disk in disk utility
11. Go to Restore tab
12. Drag and drop the desktop icon of the volume to the source
13. Drag and drop the new drive icon on the desktop to the destination
14. Click restore
15. Reboot from new disk
16. Once you open your disk you’ll notice some new icons. Don’t delete them, they are important and should be hidden.
17. To get rid of your new friends etc, var, usr go to this link: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301677
18. Follow the directions (it’s just one command!)
19. Enjoy.

It seems to be working so far. I wish I had the time to do a proper reinstall, maybe later! I probably should have used Carbon Copy Cloner.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Apple, Computing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.