Mama Love @ wifetalks.com

Upgrading my eMac 19 January 2007

I have an old eMac (2004, but still) with a 40gb hard drive. It’s been driving me nuts because I have to keep everything on an external HD. Well, during the holidays, we were rearranging and my husband dropped my external HD onto the floor. Thankfully the case cushioned it’s fall because it worked fine. But it got me thinking that I need some sort of backup system.

So, today I went and bought a new 250gb HD. Yep. I plan on taking the plundge and attempting to replace my internal HD on my eMac. I’ve already replaced the CD drive with a DVD burner so I’m familiar with taking it apart. Pray I have success.

My plan is to put the new drive into my external enclosure. Format it and use CarbonCopyCloner to clone the system to the new drive. Boot to the new drive and make sure everything works. Then swap the drives. Once I’ve booted to the new internal drive, I plan on moving all my data from my existing external drive to the internal and using the external for backup.

It’s going to be tricky, but I’ve been reading plenty of info online on how to do it and I feel confident (albeit nervous) that it will go okay. Then I shall revel in the increase of space. I will finally be able to use my Home directory as it was meant to be used – to store my photos, music and documents. It will also make it easier to use several applications that depend on the iPhoto and iTunes libraries being in the default locations. Currently I also have some applications installed to the external drive because of the lack of internal HD space. It will be nice to have all my applications in one place. And maybe, just maybe, Photoshop will run a little better and not slow down my entire system.

So wish me luck. I will post my experience once I’m done and hopefully it will be a success story.