New & old hard disk - what to do?

Hey guys,

So I am selling my 160gb hitachi hdd that came with my alubook.
thinking of upgrading to another hitachi drive, either the 320gb 5k500.b or 320gb 7k320 drive. what are your thoughts? i want performance but at the same time a very quiet and cool operating drive.

anyway, how do i wipe my current hard disk clean before i sell it off? the next owner is also a mac user. is there any particular thing i need to do so he wont have problems installing os x?

also, what do i do to load os x to my new hard disk? i know i need to run the installer from the dvd. do i need to format it first? if so, how?

and..is there a way i can clone my current hard disk instead of going thru the hassle of reinstalling everything?

thanks for the help, appreciate it.

 

vs your using Timemachine then this is a great way to migrate everything quickly and easily to the new drive.

Then all you need to do is swap out the drives put the OSX Disk in restart, and follow the onscreen instructions. It will prompt you if you would like to restore from a timemachine backup, click yes and again follow the simple onscreen guide.

Oh you may need to format the new drive first it will tell you if so.
To do to this select disk utility from the top menu bar when running from the OSX dvd, then pick Mac Extended (journaled) as the format type.

To clean the old drive use disk utility and check the option for "erase free space". Depending on how important your data is select the security level. For most people the one pass should be enough.
NB: this will take several hours to complete so maybe let it go overnight

a

ps I did the same but I picked up a WD 320Gb 7200rpm drive. Its quiet and has given a nice speed boost.... but there is a noticeable vibration kinda noise/feeling now... which I guess is due to the increase in rpm's. So my advice is to go with which ever is more important speed vs. noise level.

 

thanks underpantman, btw, which wd hard drive did u get? is it the scorpio black?

update: bought the hitachi 5k500.b drive.
anyway, so i should use my hard disk as a time machine backup disk, do a full backup.
get the hdd, format it and reinstall os x and restore the time machine backup. do u get any trouble with restoring backups? i dont want to have any probs in the future.

also, how do i know that my hdd is in a healthy state? doing an extended apple hardware test should suffice?

thanks.

 

The drive I got was this one WD3200BEKT

What I did was ensure that I had a full TM backup to my external hdd.
I then swapped out the drives. Rebooted with the DVD and restored from the TM. But this way depends on you having an spare external hdd.

So far I have been running for about 3 months sans issues.

I think using disk utility to repair permissions and check for errors would be more than enough.

Good luck
a

 

Seeing as you can get an external enclosure for the original 160GB drive for around $10 - $15 online, that's what I would suggest. Then, just restore the new drive from the original one, wipe it clean, pull it out of the external enclosure, and sell it.

Then, you also have an external enclosure for whatever you might need it for in the future.

 

Oh ya, forgot to mention I already have an external drive, 640GB to be exact and I intend to partition it, leave 200GB for sharing files with my friends etc, will be NTFS-formatted.

Can I use the remaining as a time machine backup? Also, I understand that time machine does an incremental backup and I cant choose what files to backup. Can I delete my TM backup; say every month and create a new one? How long will it take to backup 200GBs worth of file?

Thanks guys.

 

You can choose what not to back up with TM, so yes in a way you can tell it what to do.
It does a complete backup first run of what ever you have allowed, and then when ever you plug back in it will backup the changes. It will keep doing this until you run out of space, then it will delete stuff as needed with the oldest first.
The TM partition on the drive will need to be in HFS+ format (also called Mac Extended (journaled).

For the fileshare partition, note that Mac can ONLY read NTFS, NOT write to it natively. You will need some 3rd party programs eg NTFS-3G. Or you can use FAT32 which is cross platform.
a


PS you can do all this partitioning in disk utility. NB: FAT = FAT32

 

thanks again mate. As for Macs not writing NTFS, found it out when i tried to copy a file to my mate's external. I since got NTFS for Mac, works pretty good, except it occasionally disconnects the drive everytime i plug it in

This is what I am gonna do: I am gonna do a TM backup to my external (i can choose which partition to use, right? I want to keep one partition free as i mentioned before. My HDD is with a friend now so I can test it out and I dont wanna risk losing data in the process.

Get the new HDD, run the Apple Extended Hardware Test on it. Use Disk Utility from the OS X CD to format it to Mac OS Extended (Journal) and restore my TM backup.

I might just do a clean install to get rid on junk. If I choose to do this, After I reinstall OS X, do I need to boot into OS X and install the apps from the CD? iLife is installed together right?

Thanks mate.

 

Yeap you can choose where TM saves stuff.

You can also use migration assistant after you have done a clean install to copy back everything from your TM. This process is much the same as the first method but you can pick and choose what to restore.

If you don't restore your old programs from TM then you will need to re-install them, eg iLife is on the 2nd DVD that came with the mac.

Also note that Migration Assistant will restore everything to a new user account, so it might be worth calling you laptop/username something different during the clean install otherwise you'll end up with "user" & "user2" accounts. Its only minor but it could be annoying.
a

 

thanks man, i could not transfer from a TM backup as when i was backing up, my external drive's power got cut off and the whole partition got corrupted. was too lazy to go redo and backup everything so I just copied the stuff I needed into the other partition.

reinstalled os x, was a breeze...all i did was pop in my new hard disk and reboot with the mac os x install disc in the drive while pressing the "c" key.

opened up disc utility and did a quick format and installed os x very fast.
i then proceeded to install the add-ons on the cd and later followed by the 2nd disc. did all the updates - that was a big one...

oh ya, if u have your firmware password on, you have to remove it so that it will allow you to use another hard disk..

other than that, its been fast and good

 

Glad to hear it all went well.
congrats
a