Hard Drive Upgrade and AppleleCare

Hi Everyone,
There is all kinds of conflicting information, both here and at the Genius bar about upgrading the hard drive in the MBP. I was told point blank by an Apple Genius that the warranty was only void on a MBP if you screw something else up while doing the upgrade. But then I here that if an Apple Authorized Service Center does the upgrade, warranty and AppleCare remain intact. This seems like a volatile situation. So my question, is there anyone here who has upgrade their MBP hard drive, and then received warranty/AppleCare service? I need more space, as with BootCamp and Age of Conan installed, both my Vista partition and OS X partition are sitting at over 60% full, not much space for growth. But, I am concerned with the possibility of a bad nVidia card, and don't want to be stuck with a $2000 paper weight because I upgraded my hard drive. Thanks in advance!
Rich S.

There is a recent post here: http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=7941198#7941198
250GB done by an amateur and the result is a dead as a smelt MBP. Pay for someone to do it.
Not sure why you have to have only a non-portable 'wall-wort" drive - I have quite a few external drives for the MPB - two Maxtor One Touch, one OWC Mercury on the go, a Rocstore encrypted drive and a pair of no name drives - USB 2 to SATA that I can carry in my pocket, need no power supply at all and have added a total of 80160+100+100+250250 or 940GB plus my internal drive that gves me a lot of flexibility.

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Hard-drive upgrade and warranty

Hi,
I bought a laptop online and upon reception noticed that the seller upgraded the hard-drive and did not mention it when i asked how he upgraded the laptop. "we upgraded the RAM from 2GB to 4GB" did he say... only!
I knew this could have some issues with the warranty so I browsed the web about this issue but could not find any official information.
I contacted Apple support who told me that changing the hard-drive can only be done by an Apple-Authorized technician otherwise it voids the warranty. Apple told me that when an upgrade is done to an Apple machine the upgrade is recorded in the Apple database.
1. Can anyone confirm that? My seller says it is not true.
I contacted the seller who told me that "the upgrade was performed by the largest Apple VAR and Service Center but there is no such system to log any upgrade"
I asked the seller to provide me the service receipt indicating the serial # of the laptop and the upgrade performed but after 2 days he has failed to do so.
I bought the laptop with Apple Care but i am afraid that it would be useless.
Any feedback? Anyone had the same experience?

There's some debate about it and it's been discussed here quite a bit.
If you read the warranty, my view is that legally, the wording means that only damage resulting from the replacement drive itself or damage caused in the process of replacing the hard drive is not covered.
As a practical matter, someone at Apple could claim (even if incorrectly) that a future fault was caused by the drive or in the process of changing it. The longer the machine runs, the less credible such a claim would be.
UNLESS - replaced by an Apple authorised provider - in which case the assumption is that it was done correctly.
I think the support person is lying about the database. I know of Apple Authorised Centers who have replaced drives and just provide a receipt - so I'm with your vendor on that one.
Chances are if you have an unrelated fault AppleCare won't be looking at your drive. The drive itself is not covered obviously.
Personally, I wouldn't be too concerned - but then I'd be quite happy to argue my view of the warranty wording. If you're really concerned, you could always ask an Apple Tech to open the machine and check it - and give you a receipt that all is well.
Hope that helps.
Best of luck.

Hard Drive Upgrade and Time Machine

I am a relatively new Mac user so I am still learning the ropes but swimming in the deep end non the less. After I upgraded my 2012 Mac Mini to Yosemite I started having a lot of wierdness around permissions, facetime, and so forth. I had been meaning to upgrade my hard drive to an SSD for a while now and figured I would just bite the bullet and change the drive and install Mav/Yos fresh. This all went fine but I wanted to be able to use my old time machine backups to put back certain apps. The backups are still on the drive and addressable but I can't get to them through time machine. I have tried everything I could find on my own with no luck. I can't even seem to find any .sparsebundle files anywhere that seems to be mentioned a lot and the ability to inherit them. I have spent several hours on this with no luck. Is there any way in noob terms that I can get this fresh install to see my old backups? Thanks!

I would suggest you go to system preferences and then energy saver. Set the go to sleep slider to never and the display sleep slider to never. Start your process over again and wait over night.

Hard drive upgrade and Win 7 installation on MacBook Pro

I am planning on installing Win7 on my MacBook Pro using bootcamp. I also plan on installing a new 500 gig HD. I also have a new unformated external hard drive I plan to use a a backup drive for both the mac OS and The Win7 OS. What is the most efficient way to accomplish these tasks? Since this is my first Mac exposure I am not exactly sure what order I perform these tasks. I am fairly familar with The MS OS family having used the OS since the DOS days. Some expert direction would be appreciated.

This should be fairly simple, first you will want to make a backup of the current internal drive. I would recommend using the external drive for that. I recommend an external FW drive for speed but a USB will work, it's just SLOW! Here is how you will format the external drive.
1. Launch Disk Utility
2. Select the external drive on the left side of the pane.
3. Click the Erase tab and format the external drive as *Mac OS Extended (Journaled)*
Next you will want to download a copy of SuperDuper (SD), you can get a free license however I strongly recommend paying the $27 for the full licensed version so you can do things like schedule backups, access all it's features and finally get support if needed.
Once you have installed SD create a bootable clone of your internal drive, then you have a full backup in case something goes haywire. Directions for doing that are very straight forward.
Next physically install the new HD into the MBP. Once it is installed you will want to format it from the install disc that came with the computer. You will find Disk Utilities on the install disc, format it the same way you did the external HD.
After you have formatted the new internal HD then you will do one of two things:
1. Either do a fresh install of OSX from the Install Disc OR
2. Restore the SuperDuper backup from the external HD.
If you choose option 1 then go ahead and do the installation from the Install Disc following the simple directions.
If you choose option 2 then you will boot from the External HD (hold down the Option Key on startup) and then using SD restore what you have on the external HD to the new internal HD. Once you have completed this task then you can boot from the new internal HD, the first time you will again hold down the Option Key on start up choose the internal HD. Then using System Prefrences-Startup Disk and choose the internal drive.
Once you have completed either Option 1 or 2 then you can begin Bootcamp Assistant and CLOSELY follow the instructions for loading Microsoft Windows.
Once you have ruined your MBP by installing MS Windows then you can still use SD for creating backups of the internal HD to the external HD.
Regards,
Roger

Hard Drive Upgrade - Incorrect Capacity Shown In Disk Utility After Installation

I have an older model Macbook Version 2.1 that had an 80GB hard drive installed. I have just installed a Western Digital Scorpio Black 500GB internal hard drive upgrade and successfully cloned my data over using Carbon Copy Cloner. The problem I have encountered is that only 98.1GB of capacity is shown in Disk Utility for the new hard drive. After starting the computer using my bootable copy via an external USB drive, I formatted the newly installed 500GB drive with the appropriate Apple formatting (e.g. GUID and Mac OS Extended Journaled) but it only shows 98.1GB of space available on the new drive. I was able to successfully clone the information from my bootable back-up of the old drive to the new drive but I just don't have the full 500GB capacity available to me.
What should I do? Is this a problem with the new hard drive or is there something I need to change on my Macbook to "see" the whole capacity of my new drive?
Thanks for your advice,
Dave

Hi Andrew,
When I formatted the new drive did it with 1 partition and it displays a TOTAL of 98.1GB free space (both in Disk Utility and About This Drive). As far as I can tell, the Macbook is treating the new WD drive as if it is only a 98.1GB drive rather than the 500GB drive that it is.
Thoughts?
Dave

My Mid 2009 Macbook pro (Just purchased) will not turn on after hard drive change and ram upgrade

So i purchased a mid 2009 Macbook Pro from a guy with 4 gb of ram and 250gb hard drive. It worked perfectly fine when i booted it with his hard drive and ram installed.
I spilled beer in my old computer (late 2009 15" 500gb hard drive and 8gb ram) but took the hard drive to get tested and it worked fine. i later found out it was from a 2010.
Like an idiot i assumed the pro i just purchased would be able to handle the same upgrades that were in my old computer so i threw in the 500gb hard drive (2010) and the 8gb of ram.
The thing booted up fine, just a bit slow which i chalked up to my hard drive sitting unplugged for a long time.
After about 3 minutes it crashed on me. Confused i replaced the 4gb of original ram back into it. (the 8gb ram was pny i bought from ebay so i thought it could be that) It decided not to turn on or show any lights on the front except for the battery meter.
After this i replaced the original hard drive and still NO LUCK!! im really mad because i am in desperate need of the information on my original 500gb hard drive and im afraid i have destroyed 2 computers and about $1K worth of cash out the window.
HELP please enlighten me on what i have done and if the situation can be fixed.

UPDATE: Problem solved with the old hard drive in it, Now the less pressing issue:
Will the computer run my 500gb hard drive with all my information on it? I need to forward a resume and it is on that hard drive.

How do I get out of kernel panic? kernel panic upon boot. I did that hard drive cleanup and reinstalled Lion. What about memory? Anyone think I need to upgrade my memory? I have 8gig.

I get kernel paic upon boot. I did that hard drive cleanup and reinstalled Lion. What about memory? Anyone think I need to upgrade my memory? I have 8 G of upgraded RAM. (20 inch iMac core 2 duo)

If you're able to boot, launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ If you’re running Mac OS X 10.7 or later, open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the page that opens.
Select the most recent panic log under System Diagnostic Reports. Post the contents — the text, please, not a screenshot. For privacy’s sake, I suggest you edit out the “Anonymous UUID,” a long string of letters, numbers, and dashes in the header and body of the report, if it’s present (it may not be.) Please don't post "shutdownStall" or "hang" reports.
If you can't boot in the usual way, try a safe boot. The instructions provided by Apple are as follows:
Be sure your Mac is shut down.
Press the power button.
Immediately after you hear the startup tone, hold the Shift key. The Shift key should be held as soon as possible after the startup tone, but not before the tone.
Release the Shift key when you see the gray Apple icon and the progress indicator (looks like a spinning gear).
During startup, you’ll see a progress bar, and then the login screen, which appears even if you normally log in automatically. You must know your login password in order to log in. If you’ve forgotten the password, you will need to reset it before you begin.
Safe mode is slower than normal, and some things won’t work at all.
Note: If FileVault is enabled under Mac OS X 10.7 or later, you can’t boot in safe mode.

Please can someone tell me why I cannot reinstall my upgrade from lightroom 4 (lightroom 3 installed off disc with serial no) my hard drive crashed, and I am trying to get lightroom 3; 4 and 5 back on so that I can link my catalogues and continue work. I

Please can someone tell me why I cannot reinstall my upgrade from lightroom 4 (lightroom 3 installed off disc with serial no) my hard drive crashed, and I am trying to get lightroom 3; 4 and 5 back on so that I can link my catalogues and continue work. I cannot install lightroom 5 until the upgrades from 4 are on the pc, (lightroom 3 installed off disc but 4 is a copy of the upgrade download I got when I bought it) These serial no's are legit and are registered under my account with adobe, but it still gives me the Big Red Cross when I put my serial no in! Please can someone help. I am at a loss. Thx Heidi

Please can someone tell me why I cannot reinstall my upgrade from lightroom 4 (lightroom 3 installed off disc with serial no) my hard drive crashed, and I am trying to get lightroom 3; 4 and 5 back on so that I can link my catalogues and continue work. I cannot install lightroom 5 until the upgrades from 4 are on the pc, (lightroom 3 installed off disc but 4 is a copy of the upgrade download I got when I bought it) These serial no's are legit and are registered under my account with adobe, but it still gives me the Big Red Cross when I put my serial no in! Please can someone help. I am at a loss. Thx Heidi

Plerase can someone tell me why I cannot reinstall my upgrade from lightroom 4 (lightroom 3 installed off disc with serial no) my hard drive crashed, and I am trying to get lightroom 3; 4 and 5 back on so that I can link my catalogues and continue work. I

Please can someone tell me why I cannot reinstall my upgrade from lightroom 4 (lightroom 3 installed off disc with serial no) my hard drive crashed, and I am trying to get lightroom 3; 4 and 5 back on so that I can link my catalogues and continue work. I cannot install lightroom 5 until the upgrades from 4 are on the pc, (lightroom 3 installed off disc but 4 is a copy of the upgrade download I got when I bought it) These serial no's are legit and are registered under my account with adobe, but it still gives me the Big Red Cross when I put my serial no in! Please can someone help. I am at a loss. Thx Heidi

BrightBluephotograph wrote:
I cannot install lightroom 5 until the upgrades from 4 are on the pc,
You don't need to have Lightroom 3 and 4 installed on your computer to install Lightroom 5. Just install Lightroom 5 and input your serial number for 3 in the previous version box and your serial number for 5 in the upgrade box.

How can I browse T.M. backups made BEFORE internal hard drive upgrade?

Hi, all. I have googled and googled with no info on my particular situation. Maybe one of you can help. Here's hoping...
I have a MacBook Pro and use Time Machine to back up to a Firewire hard drive. I do not back up my System and Applications, just files. Consequently, when I recently upgraded my internal hard drive I restored all my data and settings from the original internal hard drive (not the Time Machine).
From there Time Machine began making NEW backups of the NEW hard drive, no problem, but I cannot browse the backups of the previous internal hard drive. Is there any way I can get Time Machine to recognize all of these backups as existing from the same machine and let me browse back beyond the internal hard drive upgrade?
Any help is greatly appreciated!

I think you have to browse them separately, but you should be able to do so by right-clicking (control+click) on the Time Machine icon in the dock or by holding the option key when clicking the icon in the menu bar.
Choose "Browse other Time Machine Disks" and you should see the old series of backups.
~Lyssa

I have two hard drives on my mac 10.5.8 power pc and hear the clickking sounds of the first hard drive and think that it may be dying, can I install everything on the other hard drive also and wait for the first drvie to die before i use the other drives

I have two hard drives on my mac 10.5.8 power pc and hear the clickking sounds of the first hard drive and think that it may be dying, can I install everything on the other hard drive also and wait for the first drive to die before i use the other drives? Or, what is the best way to handle this?

I do not know what you are waiting for.
I'd make a backup of your important stuff before cloning the entire disk.
Carbon Copy Cloner will copy your startup drive to an external firewire drive. You can boot from the external drive to verify that you have a good clone. When you upgrade your existing startup drive, you can at any time boot from your external drive and go back to your existing system.
http://www.bombich.com/software/ccc.html
SuperDuper is the wildly acclaimed program that makes recovery painless, because it makes creating a fully bootable backup painless. Its incredibly clear, friendly interface is understandable, easy to use, and SuperDuper's built-in scheduler makes it trivial to back up automatically. And it runs beautifully on both Intel and Power PC Macs!

We have a 4 year old iMac 24 inch. My hard drive died and we have a new hard drive now, but all that the fixit shop put on it was the Snow Leopard OS; can I ask Apple for a download of our other many software programs to reload them? Does it cost to do

We have a 4 year old iMac 24 inch. The hard drive died and we had a new hard drive installed. They only installed the Snow Leopard OS on it, and there were many software programs that came with the iMac originally.. now missing. Does anyone know whether Apple will resupply these? I do have an Apple installation disc but have upgraded from the original Leopard to Snow Leopard... so the OS is not quite the same. Ideas? Thanks!

No bootable bakup/clone or Time Machine backup? No initial install discs? If no to both of those, call 1-800-MY-APPLE and request replacement discs for that machine. They're available for a nominal S&H charge.

Hard drive death and invisibility

the other day, my hard drive seemed to die. i made a silly mistake - i had accidently gotten myself down to about 5gb free on my macbook pro's internal drive, and had then forgotten and started downloading more things. i guess i was downloading for a little while, then i shut down my computer, left the house, and got on a train. on the train, i plugged in my charger and started playing around on ableton live (resource-intensive program). everything was running fine for about 20 minutes (and nothing more was downloading at this point), but then my computer began to freeze. i thought it was just the program, as it can be a little buggy at times, but then then the whole os locked up and i had to do a force-shutdown.
then my woes began. i turned the laptop back on - and got the flashing folder with the question-mark. around this time i remember how full my hard drive was, and i get a bit concerned. i try a few things to get it to boot, but no joy. i resign myself to a train ride with no laptop. when i get home, i boot from the install dvd, open disc utility, and it shows only my dvd drive. hard drive invisible. as though has just vanished. so i assume it's a dead drive. i plug in an external through usb, and install the os onto this. computer boots fine, though a little slow (to be expected, usb). my internal drive still doesn't show. i try diskwarrior, and that it doesn't show there either. so by now i've resigned myself to an unsalvagable (within my price limits) drive. so today, i went and bought a replacement drive and a set of screwdrivers. i had to buy a slightly higher-end drive, as it was the only one they had in stock - a western digital 'scorpio black'. i get home and open the laptop's guts and install the replacement, then boot from the dvd. disc utility doesn't show it. i open the guts again and check that i installed it okay, and i'm pretty sure i did. i've opened it again about 4 times since, to check again and again. it always seems fine. when i do system profiler (from the boot disc or os on the external) i get the "there was an error while scanning for serial-ata devices".
then there's the problem that i'm really broke, after buying the replacement drive, so i can't buy an external enclosure to test that the drive(s) work, to see whether it's a drive issue or a laptop issue. could i plug them directly into the desktop (that i write this from), to test them? or would i need adaptors..? i know that my desktop (windows) case wouldn't support 2.5" drives, but if i secured it in place by other means, would the connectors work? as a troubleshooting thing.
any ideas? my guess at the moment, it must be either:
- the overloaded drive did something bad to my hardware (the bit that controls the hard drives?).
- a powersuge on the train did something nasty (maybe?)
- my first drive is dead, and the replacement drive isn't appearing for a different reason (it's a 3gb/s drive, i read that there was a firmware upgrade required to get these running - but i downloaded the update on the external os, and it said the update wasn't required).
- everything is toast. and i have to use windows.
it seems relevant that everything works fine when running the os through usb. it's just that internal drives don't appear or work. and it's also relevant that i can't send it away to get repaired, 'cause i have no money.
after all this, i got stressed and drank beer. so please excuse any silly errors and my extensive storytelling. and thank you so much in advance.

miinna,
Did you ever figure out the problem?
I am working on a friends mac and it has the same exact issue. For some reason my Lion hard drive boots as ab internal, but any blank or snow leopard drive won't even show up in the disk utilitiy. I can install/read from an external drive. I get the same "there was an error while scanning for serial-ata devices" error.
I'm wondering if it is the SATA cable or something worse.
Specs:
MacbookPro5,3
Intel Core 2 Duo
2.66
A1286

My mac air says hard drive full and 90% is full of 'other' which I cant work out what 'other' is as i Have transferred most to my external hard drive

My mac air says hard drive full and 90% is full of 'other' which I cant work out what 'other' is as i Have transferred most to my external hard drive.
Do you know how I can tell how large each file is taking up and what my 'other' category could be?
thanks

Initial easy steps to gain disk space:
- Delete all files in the Downloads folder.
Empty the Trash.
- Start iPhoto.
Empty its trash.
Restart.
Backup:
Run a Time Machine (or other) backup since you are about to delete and move files and you may need to recover from any inadvertent mistakes or decisions. You will need one external hard drive for your Time Machine (or other) backup and a second if you plan to offload some files. (See suggestions for where to purchase hard drives at the end of this message.)
For more about backups:
Time Machine Basics: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1427
Most commonly used backup methods:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-3045
Methodology to protect your data. Backups vs. Archives. Long-term data protection:
https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-6031
Deleting files:
Then use the free application OmniDiskSweeper http://www.omnigroup.com/more to explore your volume in descending order by size so you can attack the problem from the top down, deleting the largest unwanted files first. Delete with caution and do not delete any system files. Remember to empty the trash after trashing the files.
Additional reference on freeing disk space:
http://pondini.org/OSX/DiskSpace.html
Offloading files:
Consider moving some of the no-often-used large files or directories to an external disk. Use ODS again to find them. This will be at least your second hard drive. Your first one(s) is/are for your Time Machine (or other) backup(s). Do not offload files onto a Time Machine disk.
Format the second drive as Mac OS Extended (journaled). Using OWS to find large files/folders and copy them from the system drive to the external hard drive and delete them from your internal drive.
Then  > System Preferences > Time Machine > Options… > Remove the offload HD name from the exclusions list.
Now both your system disk and your external offload disk will be backed up onto your Time Machine disk.
From: http://www.thexlab.com/faqs/freeingspace.html
To move your iTunes Music folder to another disk or partition:
To change the location of your iTunes Music folder, carefully follow the instructions in the AppleCare® Knowledge Base document "iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Music folder."Additional information can be found in iTunes Help.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://www.thexlab.com/105/ 00000849.html
Laptop users may want to consider having two iTunes libraries: a small library of current favorites on their computer, while their complete library resides on an external hard drive. Utilities like iTunes Library Manager enable you to easily have multiple iTunes libraries you can use with your account. https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7689/itunes-library-manager
To move your iPhoto Library folder to another disk or partition:
To move the iPhoto Library folder to a new location, employ the instructions in the AppleCare Knowledge Base document from http://support.apple.com/kb/PH2506 corresponding to the version of iPhoto you are using. Additional information can be found in iPhoto Help.
Laptop users may want to consider having two iPhoto libraries: a small library of current, favorite photographs on their computer, while their complete library, or archives of older photos are saved on an external hard drive. Utilities such as iPhoto Buddy and iPhoto Library Manager enable you to have multiple iPhoto libraries that you can use with your account.
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/12175/iphoto-buddy
https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/7158/iphoto-library-manager
Hardware — Bigger disk/SSD:
OWC sells 120, 240 and 480 GB SSD upgrades for MacBook Airs. A 240 GB upgrade costs $265. http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/SSD/OWC/ . If your Mac is under warranty or AppleCare replacing the SSD will void the warranty.

Hard Drive upgrade

I'm considering a hard drive upgrade but i dont know crap about them. I went over to newegg because i heard it was a good site and found this one......
"Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD5000LPVT 500GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive"
The only problem is, I dont know wheter it is compatible with my Early 2009 13 inch macbook pro..... Should I go with this one or are there better ones out there? I'm not really worried about price. I was aiming to get a 500gb. Thanks.

It is compatilbe if it's a 2.5" notebook SATA II 3.0 Gb/s model. Take Csound1's advice. If you buy a WD drive or any other makers' drives do not purchase any "green" drives as they don't work well in Macs.
If you want better performance get a drive rated for 7200 RPM with as large a cache as possible (typically 16 MBs.) Other makers to consider include Hitachi, Seagate, and SamSung.
If you want faster speed consider the Seagate XT500 hybrid. Or visit OWC and look into their DataDoubler that enables you to replace the optical drive with an SSD (or another HDD.)

Hard Drive Upgrade and AppleleCare

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