Mar 19, '09 07:30:00AM • Contributed by: Anonymous
I just upgraded my MacBook Pro to a new hard drive and wanted to share the easy way I used to get everything back on the new drive. I had researched this topic and many of the articles I found were old. This method definitely works with the latest software used as of March, 2009. In my case, I'm running OS X 10.5 with a Boot Camp partition running Windows.
Assumption: You have a Time Machine backup of OS X on a separate FireWire/USB drive.
Before removing the old hard drive, you need to back up your Windows installation. (OS X is covered by Time Machine, so no worries there.) Use Winclone to image your Windows Boot Camp partition to your external FireWire/USB drive. Then replace the old hard drive with the new hard drive.
Begin install of 10.5, and after the language selection screen, choose Restore from Backup from the menu at the top of the screen (mouse over that area to see the menu). Choose the Time Machine backup you want to restore from. It took an hour or two for a 120GB OS X backup to be restored. At this point, OS X is back exactly as it was, except for minor things like Spotlight indexes. So go ahead an log in.
Now run Boot Camp Assistant and create a partition for Windows -- it can be larger than your previous partition without causing any problems. Then use Winclone to restore your Windows image to the new Boot Camp partition. This took about 90 minutes for my 32GB backup. When done, boot into Windows. It may want to check the disk; I let it do so. When this task finished, Windows rebooted and everything worked great -- it even expanded the Windows disk for me from my original 32GB to 40GB.
