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Easy HD upgrade on my MacBook, Arjen’s OS toolchain

When I left MySQL, my main machine was my old black 32-bit macbook which had to be kept attached to power supply (you know how difficult that is to guarantee, with the mag power adapter!) because of the earlier cordial-in-the-night incident (insurance covered that but the replacement was MySQL’s of course).
I wanted a new 64-bit macbook, but was holding out for the new chipset that would support 4GB. It arrived, but local stores couldn’t get it yet whereas the Apple store had it in stock – caveat, only the stock version could be shipped fairly quickly. Fine for RAM I was sourcing 2x2GB sticks for it elsewhere already. The HD was a tad painful, going down from upgraded 120G in my old one to about 100G in the new stock version.

Now, for OurDelta testing foo I have a nice box in my office with lots of cores, RAM and diskspace. So when I’m home or at least online, that also works fine for development work. Not so much when “elsewhere”.
Sun’s VirtualBox with Ubuntu works fine under OSX, albeit 32-bit only (for some tech reason VirtualBox on OSX does not support 64bit guests) so I’ve been using that. The reason for choosing a Linux VM over OSX and for choosing Ubuntu over other distros is….
OSX has some quirks which sometimes cause hassles when using it as a development environment. So rather than battling that, I decided to just get on with actual productivity.
Ubuntu is nicely up-to date with stuff and knows about the toolchain that I use. The seamless integration of VirtualBox is nice, so you don’t have to do keyboard or mouse capture and the guests’ desktop background just disappears: I have ubuntu’s menu and other windows just floating inside OSX on one of my spaces. I can work on things offline, and thanks to the glory of bzr I use commit locally all the time.

With doing this extra stuff on my MacBook, and the growing collection of Phoebe photos and music, diskspace was quickly running out. Changing HDs on a macbook 13″ is very easy: you get a new 2.5″ SATA and an external USB or FireWire bracket. Costs less than AUD 250 including GST.
Start from OSX DVD1 (hold C when booting to start from CD/DVD), go a few steps until the top bar shows menu options that include Disk Utility. Put a partition on the disk (GUID, hfs+ journaled case-insensitive). Then select Restore, put the “old” volume in source, new volume in destination, and let it do its thing. It does a copy then a verify. Reboot, this time holding Alt so you get the boot menu. The new disk should show up, giving a reasonable indication that it’s got the goods and will probably boot ok.
Now open up the MacBook (battery out, 3 screws for the metal plate covering RAM/HD) and pull out the HD. The “bracket” is screwed into the HD with 4 screws that have a 6-way head but that’s not difficult to work with and you can use some pliers anyway. Swap HDs, re-insert, stash away the little pull flap, and close ’em up.
Boot, and be happy. Once again, “It Just Works” 😉

I got a 320GB Seagate (in Seagate lying-speak of 1G=1000M), and a USB bracket because none of the FireWire ones were SATA; never mind that though, it just took 40 minutes to copy 100G over USB, and same for verify.
The new disk is 7200 RPM also. Being that speed and bigger, apparently it gets a bit hotter too, but not too bad.
Everything seems to be doing ok so far!

This morning I’m just grabbing the newly released Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) server i386/amd64 (for build) and i386 desktop (for the laptop VM) to take a peek at. Should be popular, although Hardy (8.04 LTS) is a Long Term Support release so I expect lots of people to use that version for quite a while, also.

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