Switching Hard Drive

Ok here is the deal. I have a Mac Book with a 80 gig HDD it is filling up fast. I also have a PS3 with a 120 gig HDD that is sitting there collecting dust. My questions are: can I keep the songs I bought on iTunes? After I put the new HDD in what do I do just run the two DVD's that came with my Mac book? To reinstall the OS's? I want to do this sometime around 4 p.m. cst so all help is appreciated.

I am assuming that you have confirmed the compatibility of the PS3 disk with MB. It's safe to backup your contents on the PS3 disk to some other disk. Then you can format and install MAC on it. There is a guide available for changing the disk (HW part).

When I changed mine, I installed leopard on the new disk connecting it externally and then i swapped the drives next day.

How did you connect it externally? Yes the drive is compatible.

The PS3 uses a 2.5-inch SATA notebook harddisk

you will need an external usb 2 enclosure, and I didn't know they were this cheap!!

http://www.satadrives.com/mi25insatous.html

You can reformat the PS3 disk and install leopard on it, then put it in the macbook

After transferring all your files across you can wipe the old 80 gig drive, now you can put it in the enclosure and you have an 80 gig external to do back-ups with.

Well actually guys I will be installing Tiger. I have the CD's that came with my MacBook and have yet to see a need to switch to Leopard.

MadGasser said:

Well actually guys I will be installing Tiger. I have the CD's that came with my MacBook and have yet to see a need to switch to Leopard.

Click to expand...

There isn't a 'need', so much as an 'opportunity'. I wasn't exactly lined up at the Apple store when Leopard was released, but when santa delivered my new SATA 2.5" Toshiba 160GB disk a couple months later, that was the perfect time to go out and get my copy of 10.5 (family pack) and perform a new install on a fresh disk, which would then be the least problem prone method. My old internal drive now lives in a USB enclosure, and can be drafted back as the original drive again, complete with a working booting Tiger if I found anything about Leopard that

* I hated (haven't found anything, and plenty of goodness)

* Broke something critical to how I use my Mac (there were a couple of moments, but so far everything has worked out there. Well, okay I haven't tried putting Parallels back on yet, but I'm probably going to go with VMware Fusion anyway and I still have a separate PC for Windows necessities, which are rare)

* Otherwise FUBAR'd my Macbook, or some aspect of what I do with it (I can do everything I was able to do, under Tiger and more.)

So really, it's more of a logistical kind of thing. You can upgrade to Leopard while you have a fresh disk to do a new install, or you can consider this to be an incremental thing and concentrate on getting the new disk in, and Tiger installed getting you back to where you were with the old disk and be guaranteed that everything YOU use your Mac for will still work and in the way you are accustomed. Perhaps in the future you'll upgrade the disk to one even larger, and at that point it will be Time. This is only my second OS update having started with Panther, and each has been relatively painless compared to certain other OSes (and I'm not necessarily implying Windows; I'm looking at you Fedora Core/Ubuntu/Gnome/KDE/flavor of the month.)