Resurrecting an oldie

Mijn probleem

My MacBook 13" Intel Core Duo ca. 2006 was on the fritz. According to the forums and diagnostic pages I visited it was determined that a new hard drive was in order. I figured that I'd get a middle of the road-in-size hard drive and picked up a 320 GB hard drive directly from ifixit.

Mijn oplossing

The removal of the old hard drive was a cinch but the installation of the new one was a bit trickier. I watched the video that was a part of the guide and that was super helpful. In the tutorial the tech mentions that there is a possibility that the foam guides on the side of the HD compartment may come loose due to weak adhesive and that is what happened to me when I tried to push the new HD back into the slot. I ended up having to open the bottom case (for which I used another ifixit tutorial) and installing the foam guides along with the HD this way. It took about 15 mins longer to do it this way because there were many little screws to keep track of and the keyboard needed to be gently disconnected and then everything had to be reversed to put the computer back together again. After installation I attempted to partition and mount the HD but there was a standard input/output error message that kept coming up and it turns out that the newer HD I bought wasn't compatible with the older OS X 10.4.6 installation discs that came with the computer. I hopped on ebay and looked for the most recently compatible OS X that I could find and bought an OS X 10.6 install dvd for $10. After getting the dvd in the mail I was able to successfully partition and mount the new HD and upgrade to 10.6.8. Resurrection complete!!

Mijn advies

In the future I will take extra care removing/installing the HD from it's compartment to avoid having to take a detour to repair the cushioned guides. Also, I would have liked to have used a backed up version of all files and applications from the old HD to boot the new HD from. Live and learn!