Upgrading hard drive - can it be done this way?

I'm very interested in upgrading my hard drive of my macbook pro, I have time machine connected to a WD Mybook and it has given me nothing but problems... randomly disconnecting, and I've tried it with both firewire and usb. I don't want to rely on that to recreate my hard drive so:
Can I take the new laptop hard drive, plug it into an external enclosure, and then clone my current hard drive on to it?
What is the simplest procedure/software that I can use to do it? Is there something built into Leopard that will automate the process?

I just set up a 320 GB WD Scorpio for a backup with 2 bootable clones using Super Duper, with the idea I may eventually put it into my MBP. I haven't done the transplant yet, but I have verified that I can boot from any of the 3 volumes, and you need to boot at least once from the clone you are making to test it out.
My understanding is that the Mac will try to boot from whatever it booted from the previous time. If it can't find that volume, it will look for another one to boot from and boot from that.
To get the Mac to boot up from your external disk, go to System Preferences> Startup Disk and select it as your startup disk and restart. When it starts, you will see both the external and the internal on the desktop, with the one you booted from on top. It should continue to boot from that drive until you tell it otherwise.
Right now your external will have the firewire icon and the internal will have the Macintosh HD icon. Once you put the new one in, it will have the Macintosh HD icon and might even be named Macintosh HD. Or you might have to name it. If you put the old one in your enclosure, it will now have the firewire icon.
Hard drives are just hard drives. It doesn't matter that the WD was once in an enclosure and used as an external.
Does this answer your question? If not, please post back.
Good luck!

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ITs an old Iomega 100gb external HD that has about 90gb of music on it. The Macbook has a 500gb HD. I would like to put the iTunes library on the internal HD so I have room to expand.
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I have a pretty old Compaq Presario 5000 series 5BW284, with a 40 gb hard drive that runs extremely slow at times. I have done everything possible that I can think of to speed this machine up. I am also extremly low on space and I am wanting to upgrade my hard drive. I know I can probably only upgrade to an 80 gb hard drive, but that would be better than nothing. I beleive it was originally installed with 128 megs of ram and now has 384 megs of RAM. I am not maxing it out to 512 since this probably would not make much of a difference. I am running windows XP professional and have about 6 gb's of space left on this hard drive with the apps I am using. My question is this. What hard drives can I upgrade to that are compatible with my system ? Also, If I replace the CPU would it improve the speed of the entire system ? I apologize, as I am a bit of a novice when it comes to interenal hardware.

Here are the Quickspecs for your machine:
Quickspecs
It is an oldie, for sure. Don't be so sure that increasing memory from 384 to 512 will not help. That is a 25% increase, and all of it will provide extra headroom. In fact, that would be my primary recommendation. You can increase to a 120 gig hard drive and I would also do that. Your old 40 gig drive is likely a 2 meg cache and an 8 meg cache (which a newer drive would have) would also help. You need an IDE also known as PATA (not SATA) hard drive.
You can upgrade the processor likely to just over 1 ghz and that would help, too.
Now add up the price of all this and I think you will quickly see that a new computer is really the way to go.
Message Edited by Huffer on 10-10-2009 04:04 AM

Upgrading hard drive - can it be done this way?

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