How to Install and boot-up New Blank Hard Drive

Question

I am looking to install a new hard drive on my 2007 MBP C2D. I currently have a stock 200GB 5400rpm Toshiba hard drive installed and I am looking to upgrade. I was looking at a Seagate momentus 320GB 7200rpm SATA or a Western Digital 500GB 5400rpm SATA. Would I have any problems with either of these drives, and would I see significant improvement in performance if I went with the 7200rpm drive?
I was also looking to start fresh with the new drive, only copying and pasting some files from my old drive to the new one. I would do this by first copying the files I want from my old drive to an external, and then copy them to my new drive once it is installed. My questions are do I need to format the new drive? How do I install Leopard? Would I simply put the DVD into the disk drive and install it from there? I've read about partitioning issues and other installation problems; will I have to deal with these by installing it this way?
Any help is appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

All of my external hard drives are Western digital. I am pretty sure that they can only be formatted in FAT32, is that going to be a problem if I decide to clone my current hard drive?
FAT32 is not Mac OS X bootable. If you must have PC readable hard drive that is Mac bootable, get http://www.mediafour.com/macdrive
That will allow your PC to read your Mac drive.
If you want to setup a small network:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2959?viewlocale=en_US
You can still maintain the Mac booting by formatting your drive HFS+, and the PC will still be able to share files with your Mac.
Regardless you can't clone a Mac OS X bootable drive to a FAT32 formatted drive. And there is no such thing as a hard drive that can't be formatted HFS+. They may come initially formatted FAT32, but Apple's Disk Utility can reformat them.
I don't know what restrictions exist in event you run Boot Camp though. For that you'd have to ask in the Boot Camp forum:
http://discussions.apple.com/forum.jspa?forumID=1244
Would a 7200rpm drive show significant performance advantages over a 5400rpm drive?
If the drives are of equal capacity yes. Larger capacity but slower drives actually are the nearly the same speed as the faster drives of smaller capacity. I.e. a 120 GB 7200 RPM drive is going to be of equivalent speed to a 160 GB 5400 RPM drive.
Also, the one reason why I want to start fresh is because my computer sometimes runs slow, which it never did in the first few months that I had it.
The speed of the machine is not necessarily as dependent on capacity, as how full it is*:
http://www.macmaps.com/diskfull.html
Thus as long as you don't approach the arbitrary 85% full point, and as long as all the software you are using has been tested with the currently installed operating system, and as long as your spotlight indexes are complete, and you aren't running any non-compatible optimization utilities, you should never have a slowdown. See my other FAQ*:
http://www.macmaps.com/Macosxspeed.html
to understand why a machine may slow down.
A 10 GB free hard drive sounds like it lacks the necessary empty capacity to run smoothly.
Cleaning the space as suggested earlier may be an easier approach than trying to install a new drive.
- * Links to my pages may give me compensation.