Here is a great tutorial on how to upgrade the HDD on a Macbook Pro. Hope it helps you if you plan on doing any upgrades!

The upgrade process is by far the most complicated I have seen. Both my old Dell and Thinkpad had HDDs that simply slide out the side. I assumed this would be under the memory or battery cover, but alas, they probably made it difficult to change so that you would need to take it back to the shop.

The video does help simplify things though.

Here is my experience upgrading a 15″ Macbook Pro that was bought in 2008.

Step 1: The Disassembling

I opened it up without an issue, taking apart the screws in the video. I didn’t have to remove the keyboard cable, choosing to prop the keyboard up against something instead. The less I took apart, the less chance there was of going wrong.

Many of the screws were held in place with LocTite or something similar.

Step 2: The HDD

Now in the video, they easily lifted the thin ribbon cable off the HDD. Not in my case. It was glued to the HDD. I had to carefully pry it off. Use something flat and not sharp. I ended up using, and destroying, my saxophone reed in the process.

Perhaps their nylon lifting tool would have worked. Unfortunately, that wasn’t in my took kit so the saxophone reed was the first thing that came to mind that wouldn’t destroy the cable.

I also had to remove a locking mechanism from the left side of the HDD, but then it slides out sideways instead of being removed.

I reassembled the system without incident.

Step 3: The OS

I then put my Snow Leopard DVD in the DVD drive … and waited … and waited. It didn’t do anything.

At this point, I would admit I was a little worried. Not sure if it was a software or hardware issue, I kept spamming keywords into Google hoping for a solution.

I found one: holding the Option key while powering on will give you a selection of bootable media to start your computer from.

Common sense would make one assume that the system should boot from the CD/DVD if there is not bootable DVD without user intervention.

In any case, holding the Option key worked. I selected the DVD as my boot source and began to install Snow Leopard. Mid way through the install, it did ask me if I would like to restore from a Time Machine backup, so I chose that option.

Step 4: Restoring the info from Time Machine

I had shut all the lights in the room while I left my computer. Upon returning, I accidentally stepped on the power bar.

Now I’m really quick to react and can “step” on things without breaking them because I shift my weight quickly to compensate. Unfortunately, my foot contacted the off portion of a very sensitive switch, killing my restoration.

It seemed like it restored most of the files, but I found that I could not log in. I wasn’t sure if this was due to a recovery of a Lion system on a Snow Leopard installation, or if the last part of the files that got cut off included my log in data. Either way, it wasn’t a full recovery and I had to start from the beginning once again.

This time, I reinstalled Snow Leopard and upgraded to Lion before doing the restore.

As a side note, make yourself a Lion Boot DVD before you begin the process. If you didn’t make one when you installed Lion, you have to download almost 4GB of data. It is more convenient to do that at the start, than wait in the middle of the restore to do it.

After installing Lion, I rebooted with the Lion Recovery feature to begin my Time Machine restore. You can access this feature by holding down Command-R while powering on. It gives you access to the Disk Utility, Terminal as well as options to recover.

It might be built into the new Macbooks, as stated on web sites, but I believe it’s only written to the HDD and not the CMOS/BIOS on the older Macbooks.

Doing a direct install from Lion as opposed to going from Snow Leopard to Lion and not tripping the power bar would have probably saved me between three and four hours.

Almost nine hours later, my Macbook is showing 600GB free as opposed to the usual 20-40GB free. #happy