It was a very exciting Christmas for one such as myself, although it was not without it’s troubles, finding a tiny tiny Phillips head and a T-6 Torx screwdriver for example. Let me explain, for Chrismas I got a new Seagate 500 gb 7200 rpm hard drive that I was excessively excited about. What I didn’t expect was my complete inability to open my laptop case. I had to wait until the day after Christmas before going to 3 stores before finding a small enough Torx screwdriver to get past the memory cover.
Once the case was open it was pretty much smooth sailing. If you are looking to swap out the hard drive in a MacBook Pro – first gen, not unibody check out these instructions from Extreme Tech, they worked perfectly for me.
After dropping in my new hard drive and putting the case back together the problems returned. The original OSX Tiger disks that came with my laptop wouldn’t boot. I should have expected this having had trouble with them earlier, but I was optimistic, maybe they would work now… They didn’t.
So, with very limited options and no one with Mac OS disks within driving distance I threw in my XP disks and low and behold, I had an operating system. I only considered the pitfalls of not having Mac OS on my Mac for about five minutes before deciding I probably would be fine without it (more about that later: I was wrong). XP loaded perfectly and once it was finished I moved promptly to installing the Windows 7 upgrade.
Being a student is a very wonderful thing. I got my copy of Windows 7 x64 from the school for a whopping seven dollars, Merry Christmas to me!
As soon as I dropped in that disc however, another problem arose:
1.
2.
Select CD-ROM boot type
I still have very little idea of what this means, but www.jowie.com has an awesome post about how to burn a new ISO that will boot on a MacBook Pro. He has screen shots, and isoBurn worked perfectly, just one check box (don’t add ‘;1′ Version Numbers to Files) that you have to change from the original disc and it worked like a charm.
After burning the ISO to a new disc and booting from that disc the install went smoothly. But then I tried to install drivers. Josh Anderson has a good post on his site that was able to answer all my questions from here on out. Also, looking through his posts he is a huge Lost fan, so major points there.
Once again, not a huge hurtle, but I never upgraded to Snow Leopard, and my Leopard disk only had 32 bit drivers on it. I tried downloading drivers from rapid share (apple doesn’t have them available for download, I wish they did) but was still missing some keyboard support.
I finally got my hands on a friend’s Snow Leopard disk but then this error got thrown:
All it takes is a few lines in command prompt (run as an admin), but I never would have figured that out on my own.
cd /d D:
cd Boot Camp\Drivers\Apple
BootCamp64.ms
Viola, model check averted, BootCamp installed.
All in all Windows 7 runs great. I was a little weary of upgrading after seeing how Vista had ravished my mom’s and brother’s computers but I have had no trouble at all. It is just as fast if not faster than XP and now I can use all four gigs of ram.
If anyone is questioning the upgrade, I say, if you have the hard drive space, go for it. I love what Microsoft has done with the OS (mostly cause it is more like OSX) and now that I have it running I can play Borderlands and run Photoshop (Not at the same time of course, that would go very very badly) without having to restart my computer.
