60 GB hard drive getting too small

My macbook is a couple of years old, and the hard drive is only 60GB. It's hard to maintain such a small limit. I don't feel like I can install that much, or hold much on my computer. The standard seems to be twice as much now, but I guess that's how it goes. Anyway, how big of an ordeal would it be to replace my hard drive with a bigger one? Is it something I could do on my own or would I have to send it off to Apple?

http://www.ifixit.com is a great resource for do-it-yourself manuals.
Also keep in mind though, that if the hard drive was not replaced through apple, your computer's warranty is still valid for every other part (assuming nothing gets broken through the process of replacing the drive) except the hard drive.
replacing a drive in a macbook is very easy and getting a larger hard drive in there shouldn't cause you any problems if you run into future problems.
-peter

Similar Messages

My Macbook Pro was stolen, and I have replaced it with a Macbook Air. New hard drive is too small for a Time Machine restore. How do I restore my more-expensive apps (ie iWorks) on my new Macbook without repurchasing them?

My Macbook Pro was recently stolen, and I have replaced it with a Macbook Air. I attempted to simply do a restore from the Macbook Pro's Time Machine backup, but since the new Macbook Air's hard drive is significantly smaller, a Time Machine restore was not possible. I even tried to choose only settings or only my User Profile (option) when restoring, but the backup was still too large to do a restore onto the new machine. How do I restore my more-expensive apps (ie iWorks) onto my new Macbook without repurchasing them? Also, I reaad somewhere that if you went to the Mac App Store and attempted to repurchase the app and clicked BUY, it would simply alert you that you have already purchased the app (and trigger a re-download)... NOT THE CASE... So I just dropped another $19.99 for a second copy of Pages... Not my intention....
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
LM

you should get a usb backup drive as well. time machine has limited use in my eyes. it saves things. but older things can be errased ad space drops without telling you
nothing beats data redundancy. 2 saves is. 1. and 1 is none
im personally not fond of time machne though i use it only for a recovery parameter for a mac
id never ever myself consider time machine a genuine data backup tool. though most do consider it as such
drive clones such as superduper and carbon copy cloner can clone your entire drive for emergency recovery. and you can boot from them as well o. another mac

IMac hard drive getting too full

Hi,
I have a beautiful 2008 27" iMac, which has served me well for years. I still love it and would like to keep using it. It came with a 500 GB hard drive. I have recently purchased and connected a 2 TB "My Passport" external drive. I have been doing back-ups through Time Machine.
Unfortunately, my hard drive has 400 GB of family photos and movie clips, thanks to our awesome iPhones.
Is there a way that I can move all of these pictures and movies to my external drive, while taking them off of my desktop iMac?
I don't want to take the chance of losing my photos. I have a friend who bought extra space on the iCloud; however, she told me once she filled that space, the older pictures and movies started dropping off in a "first in, first out" manner, losing them permanently (which hurts a lot, who wants to lose those precious children's baby pictures).
My computer has a DVD writer built in, but it doesn't seem to recognize blank writable DVD's anymore. I'm assuming it is no longer working. I tried to access it using "Disk Utility" but my computer is not recognizing the "Superdrive" (it's grey'ed out and not selectable).
I just upgraded my iMac to Yosemite, and I have a maxed out RAM of 4 GB. I'm hoping by freeing up space on my computer, I will be able to put many more pictures to come as well as potentially speed it up.
Please help. Any suggestions?
NickG

Here are some general tips to keep your Mac's hard drive trim and slim as possible
You should never, EVER let a computer hard drive get completely full, EVER!
With Macs and OS X, you shouldn't let the hard drive get below 15 GBs or less of free data space.
If it does, it's time for some hard drive housecleaning.
Follow some of my tips for cleaning out, deleting and archiving data from your Mac's internal hard drive.
Have you emptied your Mac's Trash icon in the Dock?
If you use iPhoto or Aperture, both have its own trash that needs to be emptied, also.
If you store images in other locations other than iPhoto, then you will have to weed through these to determine what to archive and what to delete.
If you are an iMovie/ Final Cut user, both apps have their own individual Trash location that needs to be emptied, too!
If you use Apple Mail app, Apple Mail also has its own trash area that needs to be emptied, too!
Delete any old or no longer needed emails and/or archive to disc, flash drives or external hard drive, older emails you want to save.
Look through your other Mailboxes and other Mail categories to see If there is other mail you can archive and/or delete.
STAY AWAY FROM DELETING ANY FILES FROM OS X SYSTEM FOLDER!
Look through your Documents folder and delete any type of old useless type files like "Read Me" type files.
Again, archive to disc, flash drives, ext. hard drives or delete any old documents you no longer use or immediately need.
Look in your Applications folder, if you have applications you haven't used in a long time, if the app doesn't have a dedicated uninstaller, then you can simply drag it into the OS X Trash icon. IF the application has an uninstaller app, then use it to completely delete the app from your Mac.
To find other large files, download an app called Omni Disk Sweeper.
http://www.omnigroup.com/more
Also, Find Any File
http://apps.tempel.org/FindAnyFile/
Download an app called OnyX for your version of OS X.
http://www.titanium.free.fr/downloadonyx.php
When you install and launch it, let it do its initial automatic tests, then go to the cleaning and maintenance tabs and run the maintenance tabs that let OnyX clean out all web browser cache files, web browser histories, system cache files, delete old error log files.
Typically, iTunes and iPhoto libraries are the biggest users of HD space.
move these files/data off of your internal drive to the external hard drive and deleted off of the internal hard drive.
If you have any other large folders of personal data or projects, these should be archived or moved, also, to the optical discs, flash drives or external hard drive and then either archived to disc and/or deleted off your internal hard drive.
Moving iTunes library
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1449
Moving iPhoto library
http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506
Moving iMovie projects folder
http://support.apple.com/kb/ph2289
Good Luck!

My video playback out...every video shakes/flashes/doesn't play right. What's wrong? I thought the hard drive was too full, but I just deleted 125gigs, rebooted and it still flashes and doesn't play videos. This is true for youtube, ads, foxnews videos...

My video playback out...every video shakes/flashes/doesn't play right. What's wrong? I thought the hard drive was too full, but I just deleted 125gigs, rebooted and it still flashes and doesn't play videos. This is true for youtube, ads, foxnews videos...

Update: The iBook can play any 480p video and higher if I encode them with DivX and in AVI format. But of course this is not compatible with my iPhone 4. At least I can shrink my library now and get away from the full MPEG-2s. I don't get why I can't use Apple's h264 though. There has to be a setting I am missing. The sample Apple h264 videos from the days of Tiger worked flawlessly on my iBook when it was new so the CPU must be capable of decoding it. I really can't understand this.
Also, since I made my videos in English for my family, I had to create soft subtitles for my wife's Chinese family, and I can't get players like QT with perian or MPlayerX to sync them properly to an AVI encoded with DivX, they only sync well with the iPhone 4 m4v/mp4 formatted files I made. This is a real pickle.
So now I may need three or four copies of each video, LOL. I need to hardcode the subtitles if I want to use AVI to playback on older machines, and keep the mp4 file for the iDevices too, while keeping higher quality h264 videos for my American relatives...
If h264 is compatible with my iBook, what is the proper encoding settings? Must I dramatically lower the settings or frame rate? I can settle on 2 copies of each video that way. One iBook/G4/eMac compatible video that syncs correctly with my srt soft subs, and another version that works well with my iPhone 4 and iPad.
All in all, I will end up with more than 3 or 4 version of each video. On my late G5 dual core I have the full 720-1080p uncompressed master files. On my i5 iMac I have the h264 compressed versions for distribution, and lower versions for my iDevices. Now I need to keep either full MPEG-2 files for the iBook to play, or convert to older formats like DivX AVI for our family's legacy machines. I am running out of hard disk space quick now, LOL.
Is there an easier way?

Greeting, I want to reformat my external hard drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted ) but before formatting it, I want to make sure that if I loose the hard drive or the hard drive get stolen, no one will be able to retrieve or recover the in

Greeting,
I want to reformat my external hard drive using Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted ) but before formatting it, I want to make sure that if I loose the hard drive or the hard drive get stolen, no one will be able to retrieve or recover the information on it so could you tell me what kind of encryption will be used or is there any way to recover the information?
Thanks!

I think FileVault is used to encryp internal hard drive but I wanna encrypt an external hard drive with Mac OS Extended Journaled Encrypted which is completely different!

Noticed my hard drive getting filled, didn't save 500 Gb of data on it. I made the observation that hidden files are been created on the Hd. I assumed they were unnecessary and deleted most of them. To my dismay am getting a kernel panic msg. what to do?

I noticed my hard drive getting filled, didn't save 500 Gb of data on it. I made the observation that hidden files are been created on the Hd. I assumed they were unnecessary and deleted most of them. To my dismay am getting a kernel panic message. How do i go about getting this fixed?

Depending on what directory or directories you were erasing from you've certainly erased important system files and perhaps important applications files as well. If you have been using TimeMachine to back your computer up you should reboot into recovery mode (restart and hold Command + R until you see the Apple icon) and perform a restore.
If you haven't, boot into recovery mode anyway and choose the install OS option. Keep your fingers crossed that the OS is the only thing you deleted and that this works. You may also find it necessary to reinstall some of your software.

My hard drive is TOO FULL - what can I delete ?

My 60 gb. hardrive is now down to 9 gb. and I was wondering what I can safely delete off of here that I don't need. I know the obvious - photos, itunes music & podcasts, etc. But I'm wondering about aliases, etc. or anything else that just hangs around on our machines that we don't need.
Somebody suggested diff. languages since I only speak English so I took those all out of my applications. Now I see that I get a scrambled up window in Appleworks when I've saved a document as Claris 4.0 and it opens it in Appleworks but it still opens. I DON'T want to delete ANYTHING that's going to cause me problems down the line!! I've saved all the languages I've deleted. Any ideas what I may have taken out of appleworks that causes that problem????
Looking forward to hearing from someone !!

You've taken action at the right time, many leave it too late.
You can use Monolingual (link) to remove unwanted languages.
I wouldn't recommend deleting things manually unless you know exactly what that file is, although you can use WhatSize (link) to find large files. Items like alias are so small on disk it's a relatively pointless exercise to spend much time looking for them.
You should consider a larger external firewire hard drive to allow you to store more data. You'll also be able to create duplicates of your valuable data.
cheers
mrtotes

Got a new MBP and old external hard drive is too full for backup

I just got a new MBP and got all my data migrated and everything. I plugged my external hard drive in to run a backup, and it apparently is too full to run a backup of the new computer. Even though all the files are the same (mostly), I guess it's not going to overwrite anything because it's a new computer. Should I just get a new backup drive and start fresh for this computer. Should I reformat my old backup drive (and if so, how?)? Advice?

You should always have two backups of all vital data in any regard. A good 1TB Toshiba USB is $65
If there is NOTHING on the external HD you cant lose, format in disk utility > erase > format MAC OSX extended journaled.
then apply a Time Machine backup to the old HD of your new computer. That will free of a great deal of space.
However you should still have a 2nd backup of data. 2 backups is 1, and 1 is none.

Need Help with External Hard drives and too much music

I am not terribly tech-savvy, and I need your help. I have a G5 PPC dual processor with an internal 250GB drive. I have two seagate firewire/USB2 external hard drives. One is 250GB and one is 350GB. I want to know how to use them to get my Mac to run faster and better.
My original hard drive is 7GB shy of being full. Almost half of this is my itunes library which is over 100GB. The older (250GB) hard drive has about 150GB of photos/videos.
My Mac is running slow as molasses and when I power up the external hard drives it slows down to what I recall my original Mac Plus ran like.
I use the G5 primarily to work with photos, illustrations and creating the occasional DVD with video and photos. the apps I use most often are Photoshop, Illustrator and Painter. I always listen to music while work.
I hope all of this information is helpful! Here is my question:
What is the best way for me to set up and use these external hard drives to return my G5 to its original blazing (to me) fast speed?
PPC G5 Mac OS X (10.4.9)

I think you should look at adding two 500GB internal drives. I'd say Maxtor MaxLine Pro for cost, but they also run much warmer (43ºC even when nearly doing zilch) so I'd go with WD RE2 500GB for $40 ea. more.
dump whatever you don't need, trash anything that is hogging space and is just temp file or useless cache. Web browsers can leave behind a ton of small files eating up tens of MBs.
Use SuperDuper to backup/clone your drive.
Disk Warrior 4 to repair (after it gets to 15% free, or just forget for now).
A 250GB drive formats to 240GB and you have ~3% free it looks like.
For every data drive plan to have two backup drives.
Keep your boot drive to 40% used.
And your data drive to 60%.
Backups can go a little higher.
Drives are cheap and inexpensive, especially for the space and performance. And they have improved SATA over the years it has been out.
By doing a backup followed by erasing your drive, and then restoring it, using SuperDuper, which optimizes the organization, skips copying temp files that aren't needed, it also defragments your files. I would do backup daily to different sets that you "rotate." And before any OS update. And do the erase and restore probably every 2 months.
Make sure you keep one drive partition somewhere that is just your disk utility emergency boot drive that is not a copy of working system, used for doing repairs like running Disk Warrior and Disk Utility.
You may need to repair; backup; even erase and restore your external drives. Rather than spend on vendor made case, just pick up a good FireWire case either with drive, or bare (and add your own). I think it'd add 500GB FW drive though.
Why?
To begin backup of your current drive. To leave your other FW drives "as is" for now.
Then install a new internal 500GB drive as well so you now have a good current backup, and you have moved your data off 250GB to 500GB. If anything happens, you have one off line FW backup.
Then begin to clean up, organize, and get your FW drives working. It sure sounds like they have had some directory or file problems.
You can find a lot of Firewire and SATA drive choices over at OWC:
http://www.macsales.com/firewire/

New hard drive, get grey screen when trying Leopard install

We installed a new hard drive ourselves in my G4 older Mac Mini ~ 120 GB, with a video tutorial and photo guide, and this seemed to go very well ~ took less than an hour. The Ram was also upgraded to 1gb (the max available) right before the hard drive (I paid to have this done, shouldn't have, I realize now, since that is easier than a harddrive install, I think). I upgraded the hard drive because the computer seemed to be failing, very slow etc.. The shop that installed the Ram told me they thought I needed a new hard drive.
After the install seemed to go fine, I am trying to install Leopard and am having trouble.
So this is a brand new hard drive with nothing on it, no operating system. I turned on the computer and got one gray screen with something in the middle of the screen ~ a small box, can't remember.
Then I put in the Leopard disc, the fan came on and was noisy for a minute, and now it is compleltey quiet. But all I get is a new gray screen with Apple in the middle, nothing else. Any clues what to do next? I'm hoping there is nothing wrong with our hard drive installation. I'm not even sure how to get the disc out of the computer right now.
Please help! Thanks!

Javier's problem is that the system requires a PRAM reset - otherwise systems that start in verbose mode would then subsequently revert to normal startup automatically.
Your problem may be that the new hard drive in your mini is not yet prepared correctly for the MacOS installer to recognise it.
Once you are booted to the installer disk, instead of attempting an install, open Disk Utility in the Utilities menu. If the drive doesn't show up on the left, it is not correctly installed, and you will need to open the system up again and check that it is connected correctly. If it shows up in Disk Utility, you need to partition and format it correctly. To do that, click on the drive in Disk Utility to select it, then click the Partition tab. Under 'Volume Scheme, select a single volume, then click the Options button to bring up the partitioning choices. For a G4 mini, you want to select Apple Partition Map. Click OK to confirm and it will partition the drive and should also format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). Once that is done, you should then be able to run the MacOS installer which will then recognise the drive and allow the install.
For reference, a G4 (PPC) Mac, (including the original minis) require Apple Partition Map partitioning, and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatting for a MacOS installer to recognise them.
Intel Macs (including later minis) require GUID partitioning and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) formatting.

Introduce new hard drive- get connected to web HELP!!??

Hello Masters of Cyberspace;
I crawl before you begging for help again- In August I had another hard drive replaced- and this time the cable to connect same too (was it THAT all this time? Who knows) Anyway, I got home.... at first, the problem was that the software was not updated as far as I had been before the break down- meaning the computer was months behind the extreme base station (which could do WPA2, while computer could only do wpa, if as I recall).
So, meanwhile, I had difficulty just switching the ethernet cable to computer and connecting too- It did not work to just enter in the data I had copied when I first got on to DSL....
I had called sprint that night finally, and he had me make changes to the terminal (darwin bash, whatever it is called), but he helped only for the ethernet wire to computer: he said that for the airport, I need apple help for the settings for airport....
A couple of times I have tried, but it is really hard to have an hour I can sit about waiting on the phone...
Finally (cue music) the question: Who Knows what I need to change to get the settings right?

HEY ALL: I am happy to report I got the help I needed by phone (and a wee from me too actually- somehow...) and if you can read this, it came through my airport extremem base station...Yehaaa!!
I accept improvements in tiny increments too!! Peace,C

Auto mounting hard drive across a small home network

Hi,
How do you setup a Power Mac 6500 running Mac OS 9.1 to automatically mount it's hard drive at startup onto a PowerMac G4 running Mac OSX 10.2.8? I have a small network at home that I'd like to cross-mount hard drives across.
I can mount the volume just fine manually from either machine. I just don't know the GUI or command on 9.1 to do the mounting automatically at startup.
Any ideas, or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
Ed

Here's the (partial) answer I was looking for.
To go from a remote machine --> 6500, do the following:
1) Open "Chooser".
2) Select "Apple Share".
3) Type in the DNS name of the computer you want to mount onto the 6500 in the box labeled "Server IP Address". If TCP/IP isn't active, then type in the numerical IP address.
4) When prompted, type in the password for your keychain, and then the account name and password on the remote machine that you want to automount.
5) Then select the drive (share), or shares, you wish to mount.
6) To automount at startup, check the box "Allow at Startup".
To get the share on the remote machine to automount at Startup, your keychain must be readable by the AppleShare application at Startup (ie. the "Allow access without warning" box on the keychain should be checked).
To go in the other direction, ie. 6500 --> Remote machine:
To automount the 6500's hard drive onto a G4, one needs to do that configuration on the G4, via NetInfo or launchd, depending upon the version of Mac OSX. These get into UNIX networking commands, which is probably outside the main scope of this forum. I'm working on getting the UNIX boxes configured now. If anyone would like to know the commands, just post back here.
I found out how to use the "Chooser" on Mac OS9.x platforms from p. 68 of the Apple manual "Mac OSX Server: File Services Administration for 10.4 or later".
The Apple Technical Note 1111 on programmatic mounting of shares under AppleShare is also useful.
Ed

Imac / spinning ball hard drive gets stuck

Hi there,
I have an i-mac g-3, but up-graded it to mac osx 10.3 (and all the apple updates)
It now seems very, very slow.
1) It often gets into a right pickle, for no reason, and the ball just sits there spinning- the only solution is a cold (mains off) restart - it wont respond to anythng else, just spinns the ball.
2) it often sends the hard drive winding and realy gurgling away (not just free spinning) like its read/writing the hard drive - a LOT!
This then brings my mac to an almost go-slow, or just freezes me out with the spinning all again (see above)
these seem to be happening with frightning regularity now, but often without provocation (ie not even during a download, sometimes when its just sat there??)
any thoughts,, thanks,,

Hi,
One thing that's not mentioned in Ferd II's links are the possiblity of bad blocks on your hard drive. They might develop over time, and can cause symptoms like what you're mentioning. To see if the problem might be bad blocks, you can open the Console application from your Utilites folder and look in the system.log.
You're looking for messages from the kernal that mention "I/O error" as the problem. The error will be on a line with a date and time, computer name, and then this:
kernel[0]: disk0s9: I/O errorThe numbers in the disk0s9 might be different, in particular the last one might not be "9".
If you do have these errors, you'll probably want to back up all your information right away, as it's a sign the drive might be failing.
You can use a program like TechTool Pro to do a surface scan and see for sure if there are any bad blocks. If there aren't many, they can be remapped by erasing the drive using the "Write Zeros" option in the Disk Utility. If there are too many, the drive can't remap them and will need to be replaced.
One final thing: just because the S.M.A.R.T. status is "Verified" doesn't mean there might not be a problem with the drive. On the other hand, if it says "About to Fail", believe it, and make sure you have a good backup of your data.
charlie

WD Legacy External Hard Drive "Draws too much power from USB"

I have a nice MacBook Pro running Leopard, a year or so old and I've never had any issues with it. I used a WD Legacy 250GB External Hard Drive for Time Machine to back up all my stuff. It has its own power source, and the USB cable works fine because I use it with my printer all the time. However, even with both the laptop and the hard drive plugged in, my laptop automatically disconnects the hard drive because the "USB is drawing too much power".
It didn't happen when I initially backed stuff up on it, and it plugs in and works fine with a desktop. Is there any way to disable the automatic disconnect for drawing too much power through a USB? I don't understand how that's even possible because the external hard drive has its own power source, and I just want my stuff backed up. I could care less if it ***** the charge out of my laptop for a few minutes if that means it will work. I've considered getting a powered USB HUD, but wanted to get everyone else's opinion first. Thanks!

Contact the manufacturer. I think the power pack for the drive is not functioning properly.

Will my hard drive get wiped when upgrading from tiger to leopard?

hello, i have a dumb question... i bought a G5 about a year ago and i would like to upgrade to leopard. i've never upgraded before, seeing as how this is my 1st mac. i was wondering if it will wipe the hard drive when i install leopard?
i was going to buy an external hard drive to back up my files (and wanted time machine, but it's only compatible with leopard)... so i guess my questions are 1) will it wipe my hard drive when installing leopard? and 2) can anyone recommend a good external hard drive with LOTS of space?
thanks!

imegs,
When you install Leopard, you should be presented three options:
1. Upgrade
2. Archive and Install
3. Erase and Install
Most folks will not recommend the Upgrade options...too many stories of 'things' not running properly after an upgrade (like filling most potholes on a road, rather than repaving the road).
The Archive and Install option will put a new installation of Leopard on your machine, while saving all your programs and settings. I recommend this option.
Erase and install does just that- it will erase your entire HD and then install Leopard on it. Do not use this option unless Archive and Install does not work
Which ever option you choose, I highly recommend getting an external HD (firewire preferred), and backup your data to it. I'd recommend downloading Carbon Copy Cloner, and making a bootable clone of your internal HD, so that if something really goes wrong, you can at least get back to where you began (like if the power fails during a portion of Leopard loading).
I've got a couple of Western Digital HDs, and they've been trouble free. One's a 250Gb, and the other's a 500Gb. Both have Firewire and USB connections... Pretty reasonably priced at Costco. You can back up your data to it, and then, when everything seems to be running to your satisfaction, you an erase the external, and turn it into your "Time Machine" HD.
Hope this helps,
Bob

60 GB hard drive getting too small

Similar Messages

Maybe you are looking for