I feel your pain. And in this page, I’m going to tell you what I did when I had the same pain, in the hopes that it might help you relieve yours.

The overall steps are pretty simple:

1. Get a new drive, 60 or 80 Gig.
2. Get a firewire enclosure.
3. Install the new drive in your machine.
4. Install your old drive in your new exterior case.
5. Boot from your old drive.
6. Transfer your old system from the firewire drive to the new internal drive.

Now, not only do you have much expanded breathing room on your old drive, but you have a tiny little firewire exterior drive that you can use for backup or as an emergency boot disk.

In the rest of the article, I’ll provide detailed notes regarding how I did all that.

1. Get a new drive, 60 or 80 Gig.

These have dropped in price over the past year or so. It’s relatively easy to find an 80 Gigabyte drive for a little more than $150.00, and a 60 Gigabyte drive for under $100.00. The links in the preceding sentence will take you to a Froogle search which should get you started.

I don’t know which manufacturer has the best track record, and a cursory search of the Internet didn’t find that information. Over the past few years, I’ve used 2.5″ drives made by Fujitsu, Hitachi, Toshiba and Samsung, and I have never had a drive fail.

I’d pay attention to the ratings of the retailer, and I’d stay away from retailers with suspiciously low prices whom you’ve never heard of and who have less than nearly perfect customer ratings. It’s worth paying $10-15.00 more to deal with a retailer who will take a defective product back with no hassle.

For what it’s worth, when I went through this process in March, I bought an Hitachi 80G drive from TheBoyz.biz for $150.00. I have no complaints.

Update (5/2/05): Microcenter just came out with latest store specials circular. They are offering Samsung 80G drives for $130.00, with a 3-year warranty. That sounds like a good deal to me.

2. Get a firewire enclosure.

I have had several firewire enclosures go bad on me. Of the three different brands of 2.5″ cases I’ve owned, the one that seems the sturdiest is the Bytecc ME-940U2, which works with both FireWire and USB 2. But I’ve only owned it for a little more than a month, and I don’t yet know how it holds up in the long run. A Froogle search shows the ME-940U2 available for about $20, so you can’t go very far wrong. The drive comes with both FireWire and USB cables, and it uses bus power, so you won’t need an AC adapter; it comes with a serviceable, if somewhat flimsy, neoprene zipper case.

3. Install the new drive in your machine.

You can do this yourself; there are excellent free-as-in-beer FixIt Guides at the PBFixIt website. If you buy your drive from MCE, they include a detailed, accurate, well-illustrated upgrade manual. I’ve had very good experience with MCE, but their price for an 80G drive (5400RPM) is $200.00, which seems a bit pricey, compared with what else is available.

In my case, I had purchased the extended warranty for my PowerBook, and installing my own drive would have voided the warranty. The local Apple Store wanted an exhorbitant amount to upgrade my drive, and they would not do it at all unless I bought the drive from them. But there is a certified Apple Repair Center in town, a company with the unfortunate name of Computer DNA, and they did the job, preserving the warranty, for $75. Well worth it. If you can’t find a warranty repair center close at hand who would be willing to install a hard drive at a reasonable price, you might give Computer DNA a call.

4. Install your old drive in your new exterior case.

This is virtually a no-brainer. Open the case, slip the drive into the circuit board connector (it only fits one way) and fasten it down. Close the case.

5. Boot from your old drive.

Since there is, as yet, no system on your new drive, your Mac will look for an attached FireWire drive with an installed system. It should find your old drive in the external case with no difficulty. When it’s all booted up, it will look just like it looked when the drive was in your computer.

6. Transfer your old system from the firewire drive to the new internal drive.

One option is to do a fresh OS install onto your new drive. If you install Tiger, you’ll have the chance, once the install is complete and the computer has rebooted, to transfer your existing settings from another drive attached to the system. If you tell Tiger to make that transfer, it will find your old drive and copy everything from it—Preferences, the contents of your User folder, even your Applications. When you reboot after the transfer, your new system will have everything that the old one had, even to the items on your desktop.

As an alternative to a fresh install on your upgraded internal drive, you can download Carbon Copy Cloner, Mike Bombich’s elegant little donationware package (suggested donation, $5.00 and worth every penny). CCC does just what its name implies, e.g. it clones your entire disk from your old drive in the FireWire extension case to your new internal drive. Once the cloning process is complete, the contents of the two drives will be identical, and you can boot from either; the new internal drive, of course, will have more free space.

Once you’ve done all this, you can keep your old drive (now in the external case) intact for as long as you think you may need it. Once you’re satisfied that your newly installed system is working as it should and that everything you need has been successfully transferred to the new drive, you can decide how to use your external FireWire drive. I kept the OS on mine, so that I could do an emergency boot from it, but I deleted most of the other stuff—all my documents and most of my Applications. The only apps I kept were some utilities that I thought I might need in an emergency—Mail, FireFox, Disk Utility, and a few others. I then set up the recovered space as a backup area. There are a lot of good backup utilities available for the Mac. I’ve been using Synk ($20.00 shareware) with good results.

That’s it. If you have questions, or have experience to share, you can add a Comment (you’ll need to Log in or Register first), or drop me a note.