1. Install OS X and all your applications and data on the new drive.

2. Copy your existing drive to the new one.

Here’s roughly how to do either.

1. Re-install:

The Tiger & other OS X install DVDs can format Blank HDs for you. The trick is to boot up the install DVD and after choosing a language, go to the menu and select something like “Tools” and then “Disk Utility” or “Disk Tool”. This is the same as the Disk Utility that’s in OS X normally, and that will partition and format a blank HD for you.

Then, quit out of the Disk Utility and continue to install OS X as normal.

I’d find Disk Tool (or Utility, I can’t remember what it’s called) on your current PowerBook first, and get familiar with it. Although being apple, it’s not too hard, and the Help is useful too.

The really tricky part would be migrating all your data from the old HD to the new one. To do that you will need to buy some kind of HD enclosure (USB or Firewire). A quick search on Dabs has found this cheap 2.5″ USB enclosure for example. It’s under a tenner, which is pretty good!

That enclosure will let you mount your old Macintosh HD as an external drive, and then you can copy the data from it. Applications can mostly just be copied across too, although some might lose their preferences (which are generally stored in the user’s Library folder, or the system Library folder). So you might want to just find the installers for your favourite applications and re-install them from scratch.

2. Copy the current HD:

You could put the new HD in an enclosure and copy all your current HD across to it by using Carbon Copy Cloner. That would give you a duplicate of what you have now, but with more space. If you don’t want to have to re-install the OS, I’d do that.

Happily if you go this route, you’ll have a back-up of you old data on the old HD, and you can test booting from the new HD by using the Startup Disk utility, before taking the whole PowerBook apart to install the new drive.

Disclaimer: I’ve not used Carbon Copy Cloner but I have heard very good things about it, and it seems very well suited to what you’re wanting to do.

Taking the mac apart wasn’t that bad – just a lot of screws to undo but the cables weren’t as fiddly as I’d feared.

We even managed to pull the old mail off the old drive and so Bobble didn’t lose a thing – whoo hooo!