A short time back I wrote about upgrading my Lenovo T61's hard drive to 200GB with a Hitachi 7200RPM drive. After that it was time to do the same to my Apple MacBook Pro, and I found some nice software to help with the chore.

While removing the drive from the Lenovo was an easy operation (remove one screw), the MacBook Pro was a lot more challenging. If you want to do this yourself, there are plenty of how-to's and some videos on the web, but be forewarned that you have to remove seventeen (17!) screws. Plus, the removal of the drive itself from inside the case is not for the faint of heart. One reason Apple's able to make such compact machines is that the components are tightly squeezed in.

On the plus side, that's the hardest part of the whole job. Using one of two easy utilities (SuperDuper, free for the basic version) or Carbon Copy Cloner (free, donations accepted), you can clone the Mac installation to a separate Firewire drive. With the new hard drive installed, simply boot the computer through the Firewire drive, run SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner again, and voila! Your new hard drive is back where your old one was, but with more space (and perhaps more speed as well if you opted for a higher-RPM drive).

Since I spend a great deal of time working and teaching on Windows, a Vista partition on the Apple laptop is a must. I've been using Bootcamp (by Apple) from the start to do this, and it's worked well for me. When I boot into Vista with Bootcamp, the MacBook Pro is a Windows machine, period, and it's run great for me. In the past, transitioning to a new hard drive, though, would mean reinstalling Vista and all of the software and documents. Now it's much simpler, thanks to a program called WinClone (donations accepted). You run this application from the Mac side, and it clones your Windows installation, including system, apps and documents. Even better, it does it in a way that allows you to change the size of your Windows partition on the Mac (I made mine larger since I now had a larger hard drive).

So once the new hard drive was installed, I simply ran SuperDuper from the Firewire drive to reinstall the Mac side, then Bootcamp (to create a new Windows partition) and WinClone to reinstall the Windows side. In a couple of hours everything was working again, just as before, but now with a much larger and faster hard drive. Excellent!

On a final note, I'd ask everyone who uses great shareware like Carbon Copy Cloner or WinClone to please donate to the creators. These people do us all a great service by building software they offer up for free. If it works for you, then give them something to show your appreciation.