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Last weekend I walked a tightrope. I was probably the most nervous working on a computer I have ever been. I gathered my courage and undertook the most dangerous of all upgrades, the Macbook Pro hard drive replacement.

My Macbook Pro has been suffering with an anemic 120GB Hard Disk for quite some time. Now 120GB on a notebook shouldn’t be that anemic right? After formatting and such it’s really only about 112GB, and after a full install of the OS, Photoshop CS, Final Cut Express, iLife, Office 2008, Logic Studio and a few dozen other various applications, I was sitting with about 16GB of free space.

I had decided to give VMware 2 Beta 2 a shot, and knew something had to give. It would be pointless to start a VMware with Windows Vista with 16GB of space.

The Hardware
Luck was in my favor last Sunday. After a strike out at Best Buy, Office Depot had a Seagate Momentus 250GB SATA drive on sale for $89. That was just what I was looking for and I took it home following a short trip to Radio Shack to get the prerequisite T6 Torx screwdriver that is required for the upgrade.

Also required to complete the task successfully, was the hard drive converter I purchased a few weeks ago at Fry’s. The Apricorn Drivewire is not only a very slick device, but it makes this whole process totally easy. This slick device allows you to connect a 3.5" IDE, 3.5" SATA, 2.5" IDE or 2.5" SATA (What the Macbook Pro Uses) Hard Drive to your computer via USB 2.0, without having to use an external case. With this device I am able to transfer data among hard drives without having to constantly crack external enclosures and swap things around to get things done.

The Software
Many people will tell you that to pull this off you need software like SuperDuper or the like. I am here to tell you, there really is no need for such software, everything you need is built into OS X, both Tiger and Leopard and even earlier I am betting. It’s called Disk Utility. I’ll tell you more about that in the process.

The Process
Dismantling the Macbook Pro is no easy task. You will need a small, and I mean very small Phillips screwdriver, jewelers size, as well as a T6 Torx screwdriver and by some accounts a spludger. I didn’t have the spludger and all went well for me so I am thinking that is optional.

First of all, either use a second laptop, or print the directions from iFixit. The Hard Drive Replacement guide is thorough and all I needed for my operation.

To make my life easier, I took a piece of poster board I had handy, and I drew circles each time I moved to a new section of the laptop, labeled the circle something like "right side of case" and I placed the screws in that circle. That way every screw went right back where it came from.

I removed all 30 or so screws, including the four, you count em, 4 T6 screws that you need the Torx screwdriver for, and replaced the hard drive empty. I did not make an attempt to backup the drive or move the OS contents until after the hardware upgrade was complete.

With the new drive in place, I reassembled the case, twice. Why twice? Somehow in the process I bent the top of the DVD slit slightly and it wouldn’t close just right, I re-opened it, bent it back, and it closed up perfect the second time.

With the hard part finished, I started the process of restoring my OS to the drive. I connected the old drive to the Drivewire device mentioned earlier, and booted the computer with the OS X install DVD. When time came to install the OS, I instead chose utilities from the top menu, and selected "Disk Utility", on the restore tab, I was able to select the new 250GB drive as the target and the old 120GB as the source. In about an hour total, it had formatted the new drive to the Journaled OS file system and restored the entire OS, all my software, settings and data to the new drive. I removed the DVD, rebooted the system and my desktop loaded as if I had never touched it. Talk about easy!

Bootcamp
I decided I wanted this set up a certain way. I wanted Windows Vista Home Premium installed on a 50GB Bootcamp partition, and I wanted to be able to access it from Mac OS X via VMware Fusion if I needed to.

I used the Bootcamp Utility to set up the partition and begin the Windows installation. After a few hours I had it up, all drivers set up, all the software and updates I wanted and I was ready to boot back into OS X.

VMware
I would say setting up VMware to read the Bootcamp partition is easy, but that might be making it more complicated than it is. If VMware detects a Bootcamp partition, it shows up as an OS in your VMware system list. You boot it, it runs, installs the drivers it needs and prompts you to install the VMware tools. Done deal.

The Aftermath
I now say that my Macbook Pro has a split personality. The list of software installed is formidable. In addition to the earlier listed load of Mac apps, I also have all that’s included with Vista, as well as Visual Studio Professional, Expression Studio 2, Microsoft Office Enterprise 2007 and the suite of Live apps I love including Windows Live writer that I am using to write this post right now.

Now my daily life I spent in OS X, chatting, mail, browsing the web and the like. My more serious work I do in Vista, that is development, blogging, etc.

I decided to give Windows Vista Ultimate under OS X 10.5 Leopard’s Bootcamp option one more shot. This also includes integration with VMWare’s Fusion for my particular setup. The machine in question is a relatively new Macbook Pro laptop. It’s got a 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo processor with 4 GB of Ram and a 120 GB hard disk. I had tried this once before with less than stellar results, but after reading about one of my contacts on Pownce trying it, I decided to use my spare time this Saturday to give it one more shot.

I started by deleting my current Windows Vista VMWare virtual machine and then began the process of setting up Bootcamp. Lucky for me this time went much smoother with the Bootcamp Assistant. It created the 32 GB Partition very quickly and before I knew it I was rebooted into Windows Vista’s installer and was on my way.

The Windows Vista installer, as in all of my previous experience is quick and simple. I don’t have metrics to back it up, but I am almost positive that Windows Vista Ultimate installs faster than Windows 95 did. That’s not too bad for an install that takes up a whopping 10 GB when it’s finished. All in all the install itself takes about 15 minutes.

I only wish that the updates were as fast. Right off the bat I had 44 updates to install. That process took about an hour to complete. Of course that is Internet speed dependant but I wouldn’t consider ours to be slow per the average.

The Apple Bootcamp installer went without fail this time. I was pretty sure that this was the exact reason I had troubles the first time. Oddly enough, the one really annoying problem I had before was that I could not get Vista to assign the laptop a Windows Experience Index score. This time it went without a hitch and I am humming along with a Windows Vista Experience Index of 4.5. The 4.5 is brought down by the hard disk performance specifically, with 3 GB of ram (don’t ask me why Vista won’t see all 4 GB) gave me a 5.1 on memory and the 256 MB GeForce graphics chimed in a speedy 5.9. Pretty respectable scores for a portable computer.

After I had set up the 3rd party applications and anti-virus software I wanted to use, I booted back into OS X to get it set back up in VMWare Fusion again. This wasn’t nearly as straight forward as it could be. Although I had removed the VM partition, the boot camp one was still right where it should be. The only problem was it was showing the old boot camp partition I had created and would not actually boot. There is a good tip here…

Removing the machine from the VMWare Virtual Machine Library is not enough, you have to also delete a Bootcamp file so that the machine will start fresh setting up the Bootcamp virtual machine again. That file is:

Users{yourid}LibraryApplication SupportVMware FusionVirtual MachinesBoot Camp%2Fdev%2Fdisk0Boot Camp Partition

After you have deleted this file, close VMWare Fusion if it’s open, then re-open it. After a few seconds "Boot Camp partition" should appear in the Virtual Machine Library and you can start the setup again. It will boot Windows Vista (or whatever OS you have installed via Bootcamp) and then once it loads it will start installing the VMWare Tools for you. After this is complete you will be set!

Now that I have it set up this way I am quite pleased with the outcome. When I am running in Bootcamp I have a blazing fast Vista machine. When I am in OS X, I can easily read the OS files via the new Vista HD icon on my desktop (If you want to change the name of the Vista partition, simply change it in Windows and it will be changed in OS X) or I can open the machine via VMWare Fusion and use it. When in Fusion I lose Aero and there is an obvious performance loss, but I am writing this blog in Windows Live Writer via VMWare Fusion right now and it’s running along just fine.

A few last thoughts
Why Apple can’t get tap-to-click working in the Bootcamp OS makes no sense to me. The touchpad obviously supports it and every Windows laptop I have ever had supported it also so I know the OS does too. Multi touch obviously works because you can hold two fingers on the touchpad and click the button for a right-click.

I have to say this makes for quite the versatile machine. I can do pretty much anything I could ever need to with this laptop now. In case you didn’t back track through the links on this article, I started with running Windows XP in Parallels. I could not get Windows Vista to install in Parallels. I decided to switch to VMWare Fusion and I could not be happier with it.