About a month ago, the hard drive in my 15-month-old Macbook Pro started making that bad “clicky-clicky” sound that is often associated with impending data loss. The 15 month age is critical to this story, as it’s over the standard 1-year warranty period for the MBP, and I was clearly too cheap (and suspicious) to purchase any kind of AppleCare protection.

Now, nothing really bad had happened to the machine yet, but when live and die by a single machine you tend to trust your instincts with these kinds of things. The hard disk was definitely threatening to take a dirt nap.

In one of the few signs of intelligence I’ve managed to display over the past few years, I have regular Time Machine backups, so I wasn’t overly concerned about losing any work. It was more an issue of timing… when was this thing going to bite it, and what would I be working on while it happened? And how could I circumvent the inevitable 2-3 day layover associated with the local Mac repair shop? (Keep in mind, there’s no Apple store — hence, no genius bar — in Calgary). Then it occurred to me: why simply replace the hard drive when I could upgrade it?

Enter the Seagate 7200RPM, 160GB Momentus, hard drive of kings. At a mere $125, how could I not? Well, except for the warrantee violating thing. But that had expired already, and I like to play with stuff, so off I went to purchase my shiny new toy.

The Macbook Pro wasn’t really designed with a user-replacable hard drive, but I’ve never been one to let 25 microscopic screws get in the way of my fun. (As an aside, as a 12-year-old I once disassembled my Atari Lynx to clean Dr. Pepper out from behind the d-pad, so I have a history of these sorts of ventures). After depositing the cats in yard for safety, I set about lovingly removing nano-screw after nano-screw, carefully storing them in tiny ceramic bowls for later reinsertion. The actual drive replacement went fairly smoothly, and within about half an hour I was booting up the Leopard Installation disk.

Time Machine usage is fairly well documented from within Mac OS, but using as a pure recovery drive has only been covered in a handful of places. Of course, in a rather genius decision, at some point in the past I had decided to exclude my System folder from Time Machine, and then promptly forgot about it. I imagine this saved a few GB of space on my Time Machine drive, but scared the hell out of me when I attempted to use the Leopard Installer to restore the backup.

No matter though, as the Migration Assistant (launched on first boot of the new system) brilliantly offers to import everything from the backup drive. A few hours later, and all was magically well. In fact, almost creepily perfect. Everything, from the placement of my icons to the default launch services, came up exactly as it had on the old drive. And FAST. Stunningly FAST. The upgrade from 5400RPM to 7200RPM is exactly what I was hoping for.

Of course, over the next few hours I discovered a few gotchas. It turns out aligning the case perfectly while closing it is pretty tough — my latch is a bit tighter than it had been. And Firefox, for some reason, gobbled up 95% CPU whenever I clicked on anything, although a quick re-install solved that problem. And the Time Machine drive itself didn’t want to accept new backups until I wiped it and started over, which was also a fairly stressful few hours.

Otherwise… another successful project, and one I’d highly recommend to anyone as crazy as me.