Installing a New Hard Drive in my MacBook Pro 

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.

  1. Perform one final backup of Leopard to my external drive using Time Machine.
  2. Replace the hard drive in my MBP with the shiny, new 500 GB drive.
  3. Restore my Leopard partition using the Time Machine backup and the Leopard OS disc.
  4. Plug the old drive into my spare Windows machine using standard SATA cables.
  5. Copy the entire Windows partition (including hidden and system files) to an external hard drive.
  6. Upon completion of restoring Leopard, setup a new BootCamp partition and install Windows XP.
  7. Boot into Leopard, delete all files from the BootCamp partition, and empty the trash.
  8. 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!