The Setup

So I have a 3 1/2 year old Macbook Pro (pre-Unibody).  It isn’t exactly slow, it does what I need. But I spend a lot of time in Windows doing development for my job (both at church as well as side jobs) so I finally decided to get a new one as soon as money became available. Well I just got the green light for a few side jobs that will pay for the laptop so I took the plunge. But I knew just getting a laptop with more CPU power wouldn’t really do what I needed. As I said I spend a lot of time in Windows running under VMWare so I end up having 2 operating systems running at the same time most days.

What I decided to do was buy a 2011 Macbook Pro refurb unit. It saved me $300, which I spent on upgrades. Here’s what I bought and where I bought it:

• Samsung 470 series 128GB SSD – For some stuff at church we did a lot of research on SSDs and found that Samsung is the single best SSD out there. Others work well but we just found too many people having issues 6 months in with a “suddenly dead drive with no warning.” Cost: $220.
• 8GB RAM – All things considered, am I really going to spend nearly $2,000 on a laptop and not spend $50 to max out the RAM? I don’t think so. Cost: $53.99.
• Second HDD Optical Caddy – I didn’t want to just replace the HDD, I wanted to have 2 hard drives. One for boot OS and one for data. Cost: $60ish.

The resulting system is a 15″ Macbook Pro, 2.0GHz i7 quad-core (8-total including hyper-threading) with 8GB RAM, a 128GB SSD dual-partitioned (one for Mac, one for Windows) and a 500GB platter drive for data (I have partitioned this as 400GB for Mac data and left the other 100GB available for later use).

Installing the drives and RAM was pretty easy. ifixit.com has some really good manuals on that. I am used to taking apart laptops so I was familiar with what I was doing, but the manual helped a lot. All in all it took me about 45 minutes to swap everything out and around. I put the SSD in place of the primary platter drive and put the 500GB platter drive in the optical bay.

Installing/Moving Mac OS X

I had just recently (as in about 3 or 4 weeks ago) installed Lion cleanly so I really didn’t want to go through the hassle again. So I decided I would just move all the data over to the new drive(s).  Maybe that wasn’t my best idea (read on) but it’s what I chose to do. My first idiotic move was to grab the Lion install DVD (as soon as I download Lion from the app store the first thing I do is burn a bootable CD from the included ISO) and then proceeded to jam the DVD up against my newly installed HDD. Oh yea, I took the CD drive out. Okay, no problem. Use my external enclosure.

The first thing I needed to do was move my user data to a temporary location. Because the install DVD does not include Finder I couldn’t just drag the user data from the old drive to the new. So I used my desktop as a temporary holding location. I booted my old MBP into Target Disk Mode and then moved the Users/daniel folder to my desktop iMac and then deleted it from the drive. This brought my OS down to about 50GB.

Next, I needed to shrink the existing partition. I tried just going strait to using the “Restore” tab in Disk Utility on the install DVD but it said there was not enough room, probably because data was at the end of the partition. So I used the live-resize partition option to shrink the boot OS partition on my old drive down to 64GB. Once that finished I was able to “restore” the old data to the new drive. Mind you, the resize did take a long time.

Once that finished I booted the new MBP into Target Disk Mode and copied the home folder onto the platter drive from the iMac. Now to get the computer to figure out where the new home directory is. Oh goodie. This part was actually pretty easy. I logged into the new MBP with my username and password and it created a new (empty) home folder for me in the normal location. Then I just had to go to System Preferences, go to the Users tab and authenticate. Once authenticated you can right-click on a username and edit Advanced Options for that user, including selecting a new home folder location for them. The change won’t take effect until you log out and back in so I just restarted the laptop and viola! Everything came up on my desktop as expected.

Installing/Moving Windows Vista

I’ll just say it right now. Moving windows from one partition/disk to another is a complete failure. I spent a total of 18 hours trying to find some way to move my Windows Vista Business installation from the old drive to the new SSD and in the end I gave up. I googled. I prayed. I threatened. Nothing worked.

I tried Microsoft’s full system backup software. That was a joke, it wanted to re-partition my entire system to exactly match the old. First of all, not gonna happen thank you very much. Second of all the new drive is smaller than the old drive so it error’d out, despite the fact that the Windows partition on the old drive  was only 52GB and the new drive had plenty of space for that.

I tried gparted 3 different ways. Fail.

I tried clonezilla. Fail.

I tried Linux dd. Fail.

In all cases, yes I then proceeded to boot off of the Vista install disc and repair the installation.  Each time it fixed some things and then finally said all is well my system is perfect but still would not boot. All but one time it would just sit there with a blinking cursor and not even attempt to actually boot.  One time with gparted I managed to get so far as to get it to attempt to boot and die with a BSOD during boot, apparently because the hard disk geometry did not match the original.

I really wanted to have Windows as a bootcamp but I was not going to spend another 3 days re-installing Windows, SQL Server, IIS, Visual Studio, et all. So in the end I used VMWare Converter to convert my bootcamp partition into a virtual machine. I placed the VM on the SSD under the /Users/Shared folder (and marked it not to be backed up by Time Machine).

The Failure

There is only one major issue I have to deal with. It seems that some Mac models do not play nice with USB/Firewire booting. I have an external USB/DVD drive that I use. It will boot Mac (EFI) discs just fine. But Windows and Linux will not boot. And no, it is not a Windows/Linux issue as the same drive/discs will work fine on my old MBP.  It seems that different Mac models use slightly different EFI firmware which means the Legacy BIOS booting process is slightly different on each. Some work fine, some have issues. Mine has issues.

This means that until Linux and Windows get full Mac compatible EFI booting taken care of, I cannot boot a Windows or Linux disc on my computer (unless I swap the optical drive back in). It would be nice to be able to do this, but it’s not a deal killer. I would rather have the faster speed of an SSD. In the long run I will try to get Linux installed on the HDD so that I have Linux available if I need it for something while I’m on the road. If that fails I’ll setup another VM with Linux. It’s not a perfect solution, but as long as what I need to access/plugin can be channeled through the VM (usually it can) then it’s good enough.

The Success

My Mac system is blazing fast. Here are some un-scientific benchmarks. Remember this is not a clean install, this is just copying my OS drive to the new machine.

• Boot time to login window
• Old system: 43.6 seconds
• New system: 23.1 seconds
• Login window to desktop
• Old system: 9.1 seconds (bear in mind this is now to an empty home folder since I moved that)
• New system: 2.7 seconds
• Windows boot time in VMWare
• Old system: Estimated at over 60 seconds (Since my home folder is gone I can’t test it anymore, but I generally would start windows and then walk away for awhile because it took so bloody long).
• New system: 32.7 seconds