MacBook – canonical guide to replacing the hard drive in a MacBook Pro

hard drivemacbook proupgrade

I have a mid-2010 Macbook Pro 7,1 that I have kept up to date over the years, currently running the latest version of Mavericks.

I am planning to replace the 250 GB Toshiba hard drive it came with. The new hard drive will be larger capacity. When I did these kinds of upgrades with my Windows machines, I would just boot from a Linux USB drive, and use dd to clone my partition images. This way, I never had to deal with re-installing anything.

This will be the first time I upgrade a hard drive on the Mac. Is there a list of recommended procedures, so that I can attach the new hard drive via a USB enclosure, clone the existing set up, install the new drive in the bay, and just boot up?

I would like to avoid installing Mavericks from scratch, restoring from backup etc.

Best Answer

Here, courtesy of iFixit, is your step by step guide to replacing your HDD, photos included at each step.

Also, see this ASC user tip if you plan to upgrade with a SSD/need advice on how to go about backing up the data on the existing drive before replacing it.

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