Santa Claus was very nice to me this year and brought me a shiny new Samsung 250Gb SSD for my aging Macbook Pro.
Hardware-wise, swapping harddrives in my generation of MBP (Early 2011) is super simple. Especially if you consult the related Ifixit guide. Basically you take off the bottom (about 12 screws), disconnect the battery, take off a little bracket that holds in the drive, and take the mounting studs off the old drive. Then just reverse the process. Only took about 10 minutes.
For the inexperienced, here’s the general lay of the land inside a 13″ Macbook Pro.
And a close up of the new SSD, seated in its new digs.
Having both drives in hand, the SSD weighs nothing compared to the old spinner that it replaced. Unfortunately, the weight savings isn’t really noticeable when everything is put back together (now it ways a fraction less than the 5lbs that it weighed previously.)
I did my homework on reinstalling Mavericks on a brand new disk (since OS install disks seem to be a relic of the past.) You need to download the Recovery Disk Assistant tool and ‘burn’ it to a USB key to boot off and reinstall the rest of OSX.
For me, it booted fine, but when I clicked the install Mavericks icon, it got the verifying the computer is eligible step, and bombed out with a can’t continue, please restart error. Of course, when you restart, it just does the same thing over again.
I looked at the handy ‘install log’ and didn’t really have anything terribly useful in it. But I noticed the time stamps were all wonky (something in 2009). I think I noticed this last time I reinstalled OSX from scratch. After fumbling around with the arguments to the date utility on the command line, I was able to get the clock reset. After that, the reset of the reinstall process went pretty smooth. About 90 minutes later, my fresh Mavericks install was complete.
Onward and upward, now on to reinstalling all of my programs.
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