I decided the other day that the 120 GB hard drive in my MacBook Pro just wasn’t cutting it any more and purchased a new 500GB Samsung drive from Newegg. I run Leopard on my primary partition with Windows XP on a 30 GB BootCamp partition, so I couldn’t rely solely on Time Machine for my full machine backup and restore. So, here is how I transfered my files over to the new hard drive relatively painlessly.
- Perform one final backup of Leopard to my external drive using Time Machine.
- Replace the hard drive in my MBP with the shiny, new 500 GB drive.
- Restore my Leopard partition using the Time Machine backup and the Leopard OS disc.
- Plug the old drive into my spare Windows machine using standard SATA cables.
- Copy the entire Windows partition (including hidden and system files) to an external hard drive.
- Upon completion of restoring Leopard, setup a new BootCamp partition and install Windows XP.
- Boot into Leopard, delete all files from the BootCamp partition, and empty the trash.
- Copy all files from the external hard drive to the BootCamp partition.
This worked for me. Now I am back up and running with plenty of space to spare!