[DrDre]

My wife has a 500 Mhz iBook with the stock 10GB hard drive. Needless to say, it is nearly full. Does anyone know of a company that will perform the upgrade (to a 40 GB HD) for her and transfer all of the data/programs etc to the harddrive. I could do it for her, but would feel better if someone else would take care of it. I am mostly concerned about transferring everything correctly to the new hard drive...does anyone know of a utility which will allow you to "clone" a harddrive. I think it would take forever to have to re-install all of the software from scratch.

Thanks for any help.

[chabig]

Use Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the hard drive to an external firewire drive. Then swap the hard drive yourself. Then clone the firewire drive back over to the new internal drive.

It's too expensive to pay a company to do this for you. You can find illustrated instructions for the hard drive swap on the net. I'm sorry I don't have any links.

Chris

[Cadaver]

MCE (www.mcetech.com) will do this for you if you don't feel like ripping apart your iBook (a non-trivial task).
I had them replace my iBook's DVD-ROM with a combo drive and they did a great job. Reasonable prices.

[chabig]

MCE will do a good job for you. Their prices seem to be about $100 above the price of the drive alone. And they keep the old drive, so it really costs more than $100, because if you do it yourself you can sell the old drive on ebay.

So if you do the replacement yourself, you can probably do it for a net of about $50. If you pay someone, it'll probably cost over $200. Of course, if you don't want to do it yourself, then it's $200 well spent.

I can only say I've done 4 iBook drive upgrades. They are not easy, provided you follow the instructions. But they are not easy either. The hardest part if getting the iBook case opened up. Once that is done, the replacement is a piece of cake.

Chris

[NYCFarmboy]

If you are in New York City, try Tek-Serve on west 23rd street.

They put in a 40 gig drive in my 500 mhz white ibook which came with the 10 gig.

They charged me 100 bucks to install the new drive...I purchased the hard drive myself beforehand from NewEgg.com