I just got a new drive for my MacBook (MacBook2,1 – black) and am quite pleased with the simplicity of the process. First up, I didn’t need to add a jumper to throttle the SATA II drive down to SATA I speed. I put it in, it was recognised OK. The drive is a Seagate ST9320421ASG.
Secondly, the restore from Time Machine was pretty damn simple and effective. It’s always the same question with backups – if you don’t test them, do you know they’ll work? I’ve grabbed individual files from Time Machine and that seemed fine, but I had no way of knowing, without having a new drive with which to test, if a system restore would work. It did. Just boot with the DVD (or a copy of it on an external drive, if your DVD drive doesn’t work, like mine) and choose to restore from Time Machine. Just pick which backup to use, pick where to restore it to and wait. I suppose it took about an hour.
Once that’s done, reboot with the new system.
The only things I noticed awry were that my hosts file wasn’t there and that my Downloads directory wasn’t either! Seems a bit odd… Anyway, copy old hosts file to new location, copy old Downloads directory to home dir and sorted. I need to look into the missing directory issue, but all in all, not too bad an experience.
[Update: small, possibly even unrelated error: the firewall seemed to have Ruby blocked for some reason, even though it was listed as allowed – just switched it to block, then back to allowed and it worked.]
[Update2: the Downloads directory wasn’t there because I, er, set it to be excluded… ahem. I’d forgotten about that.]